Numbers, numbers, numbers. High temperatures today, heat index this afternoon, and the chance of rain overnight tonight – are all numbers. Every weather cast created by broadcast meteorologists is filled with numbers. At Baron Weather, we designed a weather system to reign these numbers in for our customers, whose job is to wrestle these values into a coherent story. The key was understanding and making our partner’s workflow easy, saving them crucial time.
To help our partners succeed in their storytelling goals, we needed a strong starting point and a means to control their forecast and share it on all the platforms they need to share that information. So, we began with the National Weather Service’s forecast database. This database compiles a forecast for every point in the United States. This means that for every city, every latitude and longitude, there is a 48-hour hourly and daily forecast which covers seven days. The forecast includes numerous individual values for temperatures, winds, rain chances, and more. While other weather solutions provide model-generated values for their projections, the key to our choice was the human factor. The National Weather Service forecast database is created by staff in every office across the country, local people with local knowledge.
(PLEASE NOTE: 00:59 Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.)
Making Quick Work of Editing
Now that we had a great place to start, we needed to create the means to have our partners make their adjustments or alter the forecast completely. We designed software we call QuickEditor to give them the means to control every aspect.
In the Daily Tab of the software, the forecaster can slide, enter, or tab through each day, making easy adjustments (left image below). On the Hourly Tab (right image below), the user can make subtle or drastic changes to the forecast every hour for the next 48 hours. Temperature, feels-like temperature, wind speed, wind gust, etc., are editable by the hour, or changes can be made over multiple hours quickly and easily. This intuitive software provides a solid foundation, and the editable features provide the means to control the whole story.
In the end, once all the appropriate changes are made, a forecaster can publish this prediction to every one of the graphical elements on-air, online, or on a mobile app. Also, the app connection could be a Baron app or use the data provided for their uniquely designed app.
And remember, if there is no forecaster available to change or edit the forecast, the forecast from the National Weather Service will be displayed. This “backup” of having a forecast massaged by a human being, not just straight model data, serves our customers who may be understaffed, providing a foundation of accuracy. Here at Baron, we believe that our customers deserve easy-to-use software; we pay attention to every click they make in our software. Every click is time, time which is crucial to their success.
Talk to Our Experts
If you’d like to learn more about the Lynx software upgrades and new data products designed to empower broadcasters with tools to better detect and forecast weather, talk to our experts or get a demonstration.
