Advisories Panel Tour

Written on: 12th Mar 2021

Met4Cast has up until now been purely social media based across Facebook & of course, Twitter. Late last year I decided a website would be beneficial for a number of reasons. 

1. Issuing multi-day advisories on Twitter quickly become confusing & hard to follow because there's no simple or easy way to view them all in order.
2. Twitter is limiting on how much information you can convey. A website is much broader & allows deeper diving into severe weather events & forecasts.

The website was built around one purpose; Issuing clear & concise weather advisories with clear messaging and the ability to have multiple advisories in force at any one time. The website allows for 4 individual days of advisories. When advisories are in force, there are a few different indicators. The first being the status bar at the top of every page of the website, these are colour coded to watch the advisory level, as seen in the examples below. 

The above advisory status bar also includes colour matched bars to convective outlooks, as seen below.

All advisories & convective outlooks will appear on the homepage in the format below. The day the advisory is valid appears in the box above the graphic. All advisories expire automatically & are moved into the archive, however in certain situations these can be manually cancelled or extended if appropriate. 

If an advisory crosses over two days, for example if an advisory is valid between; Friday 12th March 10pm - Saturday 13th March 9am then the advisory will appear as in the example below. At midnight on Friday the “Friday” section of the advisory will expire & automatically be removed, leaving just the Saturday section of the advisory, which in the above example will automatically expire at 9am. 

When no advisories are issued, this area will be replaced with the blog section below it. 

You can view all previous advisories by clicking “View Previous” on the right hand side of the page. To view the advisory criteria & thresholds navigate to the ‘Graphics Explained" page of the website.