Presentation Media

Session Media

General Session: Broadening the Scope of TV Weather Graphics with the Help of the Internet and a Little Data Manipulation Netcast Archive Television stations across the country acquire their weather data/graphics from one of four vendors. This data is public domain, and thus free. However, the data has to be packaged in such a way to insure that the software being used can read it, and more importantly display it! This results in significant monthly charges. About 2 years ago, a couple of us in the WRAL Weather Center discovered a myriad of datasets available through the internet, that in many cases were much higher resolution than the data we were paying for. Since that time, we have routinely downloaded these datasets to produce weather graphics that are not available through any of the vendors. I will share a bit about the process of acquiring and manipulating the data, as well as how we are using this process to adopt a new forecasting philosophy. General Session: Broadening the Scope of TV Weather Graphics with the Help of the Internet and a Little Data Manipulation Netcast Archive Television stations across the country acquire their weather data/graphics from one of four vendors. This data is public domain, and thus free. However, the data has to be packaged in such a way to insure that the software being used can read it, and more importantly display it! This results in significant monthly charges. About 2 years ago, a couple of us in the WRAL Weather Center discovered a myriad of datasets available through the internet, that in many cases were much higher resolution than the data we were paying for. Since that time, we have routinely downloaded these datasets to produce weather graphics that are not available through any of the vendors. I will share a bit about the process of acquiring and manipulating the data, as well as how we are using this process to adopt a new forecasting philosophy.