The importance of weather reporting and forecasting in our daily lives cannot be contested. A large percentage of the people in the United States watch their local evening news on a nightly basis just to see the local weather report and forecast. This information is then used to make decisions for the next day, or even for the upcoming weekend, such as what to wear, what activity to do, what activity not to do, what to bring on an outing, etc. Under certain circumstances, such as in the case of severe weather, people sometimes find themselves in situations where they are making life and death decisions based upon the weather information they have available to them.
To assist local television stations, as well as the national networks, in providing accurate and timely weather reporting and forecasting, the National Weather Service (NWS) maintains a network of radar installations located at some one hundred thirty-eight sites throughout the United States. Observers at each of these installations monitor the weather conditions within their area and provide hourly teletyped messages to subscribers, typically through a third party weather service provider such as GTE Contel, a subsidiary of GTE Government Systems. In addition, other services provide lightning strike information on a subscription basis, such as through Global Atmospherics, Arizona, U.S.A.
The weather information provided by any one or a combination of the above services is typically synthesized at the local television station into a understandable format for presentation to the public. Several commercially available systems provide this capability, such as the FasTrac.TM. by Baron Services, Inc., Huntsville, Ala., U.S.A. In general, these systems combine a geographical and topographical image map with meteorological data, such as radar and lightning, in an overlying fashion. In addition, the local temperatures for various communities or cities within the viewing area of the station may also be generated on the image map. A sequence of these composite weather images can be looped to create weather animation.
A detailed description of one such system is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 5,583,972 to Miller. Briefly, the Miller patent describes a weathercasting system for displaying real-time photo-realistic three-dimensional pictorial representations of weather conditions created from meteorological data combined with geographical and topographical data. The meteorological data is combined with the geographical and topographical data to produce a digital signal capable of being transmitted to a computer, displayed on a computer display screen, or manipulated by peripheral devices connected with the computer.
However, current weather graphics systems have several limitations associated with them, a few of which are delineated below. First, they generally cover large areas and do not provide localized meteorological information. Second, the graphical images generated by these systems are typically not made available to subscribers on a continuous basis for viewing at any time, but are merely provided at specific times throughout the day. Third, many of these weather graphics systems rely on current weather condition data that is manually entered via a keyboard.
In today's culture, there is a growing demand by the consuming public to have real-time information provided on demand. This desire has surely been fueled by the technological advancements made in broadcast and point to point communication networks, not to mention the advancements in computer technology. This also holds true for weather reporting and forecasting. As evidence of this trend, one needs to look no further than the popularity and success of The Weather Channel.TM.. The Weather Channel.TM. began in 1982 with a national audience of around 2.5 million homes and currently has an audience of over 63 million homes. As is familiar to those who have viewed The Weather Channel's.TM. programming, The Weather Channel.TM. provides national and regional weather reporting and forecast, including real-time relays of severe weather watches and warnings. Further, The Weather Channel.TM. provides all this programming 24 hours-a-day, seven days a week, and thereby fulfills a need of the consuming public. As another example of the desire to have real-time weather information on demand, numerous weather services have developed websites which provide weather information on the World Wide Web, including The Weather Channel.TM. at http://www.weather.com, and Weather Services International's Intellicast at http://www.intellicast.com. However, these systems are severely limited as to the amount and detail of localized information they can provide. Typically, these systems are only able to provide the temperature and sky conditions for particular cities. Some of the Internet weather services are able to provide a graphical image of the weather conditions for the entire United States, or possibly, a region thereof, but not for a localized area.
Therefore, a need exists in the industry for a weather graphics system that is capable of providing real-time weather graphics for a localized area on a continuous fashion.