Weather Design

Use cases

How do I need to get dressed tomorrow ?
Do I need to take my umbrella this morning ?
Will I enjoy this outside party tomorrow evening ?
Do I need to put the car in the garage or can I leave it outside ?
Does some untypical weather situation is making me have to protect myself, my goods or others ?
Should I plane to go to the beach or to the cinema this week-end ?
Should I take a train ticket to got to the sea next holiday ?
Should I go to Finland or Morocco this summer ?
It has just stopped to rain. It's sunny now. Can I go out now that the rain has gone ?
Is next week weather getting better or worse ?
Why is it so hot ?
Why is it warmer here than here despite it's usually not ?

weather station case (much more specific) :

I have bought a weather station, I want to know how is the weather according to it.
I have several measure points with my station. I want to check and distinguish them.
I want an historic of the weather according to these stations.

Trivial considerations about weather apps :

Weather can affect our mood :

Arrrrrf, it's still raining, I feel sad when it's rainy. When is it going to change ?
Hey, it's snowing ! It almost never does where I live, let's go sledgind.
This sky, these clouds, this light, this landscape, sunset or sunrise are often considered

Some application takes benefit of these aspects by refering directly to the mood (http://www.wearenation.co.uk/work/optimistic-weather-app/)

weather is also about context :

It's not an important news that it's rainy if it has been rainy for the last 2 weeks.
The same phenomenon can be interprated are extreme or usual depending where it happens.
The same temperature can be considered hot or cold according to where it is measured?

Artwork in weather apps

Artwork is often use in order to convey information about weather. Artwork can be :

iconic
realistic (weatherHD)
more abstract representations (ecloud project)

They can be animated or not. Most of the time, animations are used mostly to be cool, be could be used to add useful informations about the weather in order to differentiate a few showers afternoon to a long rainy one for example.

On many applications they provide these informations only on very specific conditions : visibility if their is fog ; and on few nuances (three different cover info : cloudy partly cloudy, sunny). They identify some typical weather situation rather than providing precise information on weather conditions.

High definition artwork can also help providing more important information to the user by telling how local are some weather phenomenon gonna be (like rain).

How can this fit in gnome desktop ?

Label and artwork :

Label describing the weather often correspond to an artwork, but it could provide important precisions to complete it with information like probability for described phenomenon.

Locations :

Gnome can guess the location of the user from network. It should also have a default location if it's impossible for gnome to find it's location or if the location found is wrong (due to network i.e.). Previous or frequent locations might be saved and easy to access.

It might also be usefull to compare weather on different locations. It's not sure it's worth using a map if we can't make our own maps.

Maps :

Maps are a great solution to make weather evolution easy to understand and remember. This require displaying continuous information, evolving through time if possible. It's useless to use a map which display icons or numeric values on different cities. In opposite maps displaying isobar, warm and cold front, winds, radar maps are usefull. These maps can be used complementary with other data represented through graphics. For example, when a cold front comes over a location, it's likely to rain. It gives a better understanding on situation to make relation between precipitations and temperature.

Graphics :

Graphics can display different information to consider relation between them through time.

Temperature can be graphed by different amount of time. Displaying a continuous weather timeline over the week might not be a great idea since day and night variations makes harder to read the whole week variation.

Pressure provide a good first and global understanding of weather without having to look to many different data (wind, temperature, precipitation), but the user has to know what it means. User has to be helped with : the average pressure and an explaination about what means a high pressure (by using icons for example).

Sparklines can also be usefull here.

forecast precision :

This is a brief summup from what I read on forecast websites :

forecasts on 24 to 48 hours are rather precise : we can hope it will tell us how will it rain and the temperature.
forecast on 7 to 10 days are less precise : we can know it will rain, or if it will be rather colder or warmer than previous days.
forecast on next season are rather good on tropical regions and less on temperate latitudes. we could get, as an information if it's going to be a rather hot/rainy summer. Not on which week will it be sunny as an example. I'm not sure it makes sense to look for a way to display it. Maybe the web should answer these more specific questions.

icon sets

Comments :

weather.gov use a lot of different icons, corresponding to a still larger set of conditions (labels) http://www.nws.noaa.gov/xml/current_obs/weather.php For example, they have 5 levels for sky cover (against 2 for actual gnome icon sets). Yet, the thumberstorm icon correspond to tens of different conditions. Since, they have a single icon for wind (and one for tornado). Some also use information about temperature. Google also use icons directly linked to temperature (ice).

Notifications on severe weather conditions

Freeze risk : T° lower below 1°C
wind : How many categories ?
snow ?