World Meteorological Organization announced the service enhancement of Severe Weather Information Centre

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced the service enhancement of the Severe Weather Information Centre (SWIC) by addition of a gale webpage (http://severe.worldweather.wmo.int/gale) and a software widget known as SWIdget.

The gale information helps users around the globe to be aware of the latest high wind areas so as to take necessary precautionary measures. The SWIdget automatically retrieves official severe weather warning messages from the SWIC platform and alert the users. SWIdget users can now obtain warnings from five contributing weather services in near real-time: Hong Kong, China; Macao, China; Guam, United States; Republic of Korea and Singapore. More weather services are expected to contribute warnings to this new service, supporting the disaster risk reduction work of WMO.

The WMO announcement also mentioned the highly successful World Weather Information Service (WWIS) (http://worldweather.wmo.int/) with the cumulative total number of page visits since 2001 reaching 850 million and a record high of 147 million in 2010 alone.

The SWIC and WWIS websites are developed and operated by HKO on behalf of WMO.

Details of WMO's announcement can be found at:

http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_908_en.html .