New contributing members for the SWIdget Service of the Severe Weather Information Centre
4 February 2012
The Severe Weather Information Centre (SWIC) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is enhanced today (1 February 2012) with the provision of severe weather warnings from two additional weather services via the SWIdget service. The two new contributing weather services are the China Meteorological Administration and Malaysian Meteorological Department. Launched in 2010, SWIdget is a software tool developed by the Observatory on behalf of WMO to display weather warnings of contributing members automatically on user personal computers once the warnings are issued or updated. The SWIdget service now provides near real-time weather warnings from seven weather services in Hong Kong, Macao, Guam, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Guangdong province of China.
SWIdget users can select official weather warnings of their choice (Figure 1). A dialogue box (Figure 2) will pop up with an audio alarm on the user's PC whenever there is a change of warning status.
To become a SWIdget user, one may download the SWIdget software from the SWIC website at http://severe.worldweather.wmo.int/swidget/swidget.html. The installation guide and user guide can also be found on this webpage.
SWIC is a WMO website (http://severe.worldweather.wmo.int/) that integrates and enhances regional activities to reduce loss of life and damages due to severe weather. The website provides tropical cyclone information originated from official weather services in different regions of the world. In addition to tropical cyclones, the website also features official observation data for severe weather including gales, heavy rain and thunderstorm. SWIdget is gaining popularity and the visit figures have exceeded 15 million since its launch in end of June 2010.
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Figure 1: "Warning Option" page of the SWIdget user interface |
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Figure 2: Sample dialogue boxes showing Strong Wind - Rough Sea Warning and |