Launch of an Optimized Version of the SWIdget Service for the Severe Weather Information Centre
28 September 2012
| A new version (2.1) of the SWIdget service of the Severe Weather Information Centre (SWIC) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is launched today (28 September 2012). The SWIdget now provides weather warnings from seven weather services, viz. Hong Kong, Macao, Guam, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Guangdong province of China in a near real-time manner. The SWIdget is a software tool developed by the Observatory on behalf of the WMO to display weather warnings of contributing members automatically on personal computers. The new version improves program stability and optimizes the user interface for selecting official weather warnings of user's choice (Figure 1). Dialogue box (Figure 2) will pop up with an audio alarm on the user's personal computer upon change in warning status. For users who have installed version 2.0, the program will automatically prompt for an update when it restarts. For new users or users who are using the old version (1.0), they may download the latest version of SWIdget from the SWIC website at http://severe.worldweather.wmo.int/swidget/swidget.html. 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 over different regions of the world. In addition to tropical cyclones, the website also features official observations of severe weather such as gales, heavy rain, thunderstorm and fog. The visitor figures of the SWIdget have exceeded 21 million since its launch in 2010.
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