New domain names for the Websites on Official City Weather Forecasts and Global Severe Weather on the World Meteorological Day

From 23 March 2006 onwards, the domain names of the World Weather Information Service (English version) and Severe Weather Information Centre websites will be changed to worldweather.wmo.int and severe.worldweather.wmo.int respectively.

The World Weather Information Service website provides the global community with official weather forecasts and monthly climates of major cities supplied by the national meteorological and hydrological services around the world. The Severe Weather Information Centre website specialized on providing official observations and warnings of severe weather such as tropical cyclone, heavy rain and thunderstorm. The idea of developing official websites as a one-stop portal for global city forecasts and warnings was initiated by the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) and the idea was widely supported among the Members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a specialized agency under the United Nations. Subsequently, HKO was invited to develop and manage the above two websites on behalf of WMO.

The change of domain names from one with a ".org" tag to one with a ".wmo.int" tag clearly identifies the websites as part of the WMO. To enable smooth transition, the old domain names viz. www.worldweather.org and severe.worldweather.org will continue to be operative for some time. However, the Hong Kong Observatory encourages the public to start using the new domain names for browsing these two websites from now on.