NZ Weather Forum

Meh.

Feedback is always good, just don't bite the hand that feeds.

Anyway, just for your info, I am actually at work today, and in the process of hunting for my weather balloon after it went through some rain (radars prefer looking at rain to weather balloon targets - its what they're designed to do) I lost control of the azimuth, and it turns out a amplifier has blown. The radar will be down till tomorrow morning at the very earliest.

Good grief - didn't NZ already pay for these things? Why on earth do people in power think they have the right to try to sell our own belongings back to us and at such exorbitant rates?

huh?
the 7 minute rain radars are now available to the public for free on the Met Service web site
so I fail to see what you are refering too there Twizel Dave

Twizel Dave wrote:Good grief - didn't NZ already pay for these things? Why on earth do people in power think they have the right to try to sell our own belongings back to us and at such exorbitant rates?

Easy - the public DIDN'T pay for them entirely. If I remember back to the Metservice blog, its about 50/50 public funding, and money earnt by the Metservice as a company. Metservice needs to earn money just like any other company out there, not only to return to the shareholders (the govt) but to pay for maintanence of the gear, etc.

MetService blog here (scroll half way down).

Tahii wrote:

Twizel Dave wrote:Good grief - didn't NZ already pay for these things? Why on earth do people in power think they have the right to try to sell our own belongings back to us and at such exorbitant rates?

Easy - the public DIDN'T pay for them entirely. If I remember back to the Metservice blog, its about 50/50 public funding, and money earnt by the Metservice as a company. Metservice needs to earn money just like any other company out there, not only to return to the shareholders (the govt) but to pay for maintanence of the gear, etc.

Great job with the radar network. I think this is an absolutely fantastic decision. The crown pays 50% to MetService (as you say) and the rest is from their clients - but the majority of those clients are goverment depts, other SOEs (including the state broadcaster, DOC, local councils, etc). So one could argue that it's mostly taxpayers money going into it in a roundabout way.

But still, it's good to see this issue resolved and the public can now see near realtime images. The next step will be for cheaper user-pay products so enthusiasts can access better quality images but for a price that is fair (ie, $20 a month rather than $300 to $500). They'd make more money if they dropped the price.

Cheers for a job well done
Phil

Minus 5.8C at Blenheim Aero late yesterday morn? Yeah Right! lol

Lower Hutt AWS has also been stuck on 20.3C since early yesterday arvo.

Nev wrote:Minus 5.8C at Blenheim Aero late yesterday morn? Yeah Right! lol

oh dear ...well that'll push the price of wine up

Although, not a MetService observation, I noted that Jeff Northcote recorded a maximum gust of 8388607 km/h for today I suppose if you drove past his house, would there be anything there ?

NZ Thunderstorm Soc wrote:Although, not a MetService observation, I noted that Jeff Northcote recorded a maximum gust of 8388607 km/h for today I suppose if you drove past his house, would there be anything there ?

Proboably not even the road to drive past on

Darn you Metservice - Now I'll have to write new scripts so that I can burgle those nice images from the new radar display for my site - with accreditation of course

Why doesn't metservice put a white outline over the radar image? It is making it hard to see where the heavy falls are located, especially in a wide rain band

Check out the new Auckland page, they've added temps for different areas of Auckland
And they've added an hourly model for the different regions too!
http://metservice.com/towns-cities/auckland

David wrote:Check out the new Auckland page, they've added temps for different areas of Auckland
And they've added an hourly model for the different regions too!
http://metservice.com/towns-cities/auckland

Very handy

David wrote:Check out the new Auckland page, they've added temps for different areas of Auckland
And they've added an hourly model for the different regions too!
http://metservice.com/towns-cities/auckland

Short piece on the science behind the forecasts:
http://blog.metservice.com/2011/12/the- ... forecasts/

Great upgrades on the MetService site! the real-time radar and the video updates in actual weather language (rather than TV talk) are a real plus - now if we could just get a radar feed to Radarscope, like in the States for storm chasing??

Dont people find it an issue with no country outline on the new radar images? As soon as a blob of rain passes over Auckland, it's hard to work out where the city is.

igaquo1 wrote:Dont people find it an issue with no country outline on the new radar images? As soon as a blob of rain passes over Auckland, it's hard to work out where the city is.

Perhaps they should make a control to change the opacity of the radar overlay.

That way they can keep it they way it is and when rain passes over the land you can turn up the opacity so you can see the land underneath.....
Most browsers are now CSS3 compatible so they can use the opacity method to achieve it.

igaquo1 wrote:Dont people find it an issue with no country outline on the new radar images? As soon as a blob of rain passes over Auckland, it's hard to work out where the city is.

yes i use metconnect but went onto metservice today and found it impossible to find where i was on the map too.

will be a simple fix for MS to do.

Metservice TV has now launched: http://www.metservice.com/tv/index