It’s hardly been a quiet few weeks with our wet summer weather but as of Monday WeatherWatch.co.nz resumes it’s normal daily schedule which means more stories, earlier publishing plus we have some new announcements for the year ahead!

Auckland Forecasts
Our new Auckland forecasts were launched on Christmas Eve and we’ve had plenty of feedback about the new look and style.  We’ve had huge support for the new look but also a number of you are missing the more detailed information we used to have.  Rest assured we will be bringing back the two part long range forecasts (daytime and nighttime).  We have a number of projects on the go and so we wanted to just launch the new look forecasts before 2012 started – and in the near future each day will again be split into daytime and nighttime – to help you better plan your week ahead.

Chance of rain percentages will also return – in the meantime we’ll try to put the percentage into the forecast as often as possible and into our various news stories.

We’ll also switch on the comments section soon.  We had to close it over Christmas and New Year as we made behind the scenes changes. 

National Forecasts
For those of you outside of Auckland, yes, we are still working on National Forecasts!  It’s mostly completed and over the past few weeks we’ve been testing for technical bugs.  Most are now ironed out, and while we’re running a little behind schedule, we hope to launch very soon.

This will be Phase 1 of National Forecasts.  Apart from Auckland these forecasts will be computer generated by the team at MetOcean.  As the year goes on – and we hear from you on their accuracy – we’ll make changes where changes are needed.  Remember unlike the government forecaster WeatherWatch.co.nz receives absolutely no taxpayer funding, so our resources are limited – however as we continue to grow we’ll have humans checking more and more regions to make us even more accurate.

5am news
As of tomorrow, Monday, we’ll shift our first story of the day back to 5am (we moved our first story of the day to 6am over the main Summer holidays).   We’ll also be adding an extra story each day to our line up of news.

Weather Videos
Philip Duncan and the team at nzherald.co.nz are excited to be returning to your screens this coming week with our weather videos.  They will start this week (we can’t give you a day yet as we’re moving into new studios in the Herald building).  As we did in 2011 we’ll be doing weather videos each Monday, Wednesday and Friday.   We’d love you to pass on your positive feedback to the team at nzherald.co.nz too – and let them know what you like about our weather videos and if you’d like to see more of them made each week!  You can send the Herald feedback by clicking here. 

Better Focus for 2012
In 2012 we’re going to have more consistency with our news service.  One great service we’ll soon be providing is an explanation of the national weather each weekday morning at 5am.  It’s a chance for you to log on when you wake up and have a quick glance at the overall conditions across the country.  While it won’t always be town specific it will paint a picture of what the day ahead will be like across New Zealand.

Warnings
We’re working hard to create a Warnings page that not only displays the government warnings from MetService, but also our own Storm Alerts.  For some odd reason MetService refuses to provide a data feed to us for all of their tax payer funded warnings – but are investing in competing with WeatherWatch.co.nz instead.  However once we’ve completed our National Forecasts we’ll be working on a system that ensures we receive all of their warnings on our website automatically – without the need to manually do this, which isn’t as trustworthy.  This involves more work at our end by our techs to make this happen, but we’re happy to invest in this ourselves in the interests of public safety.

Bigger Team
Over summer WeatherWatch.co.nz hired a new forecaster, Howard Joseph.  (Read his profile here).  Howard has been a valuable addition to the team over the summer holidays and will be assisting Philip Duncan and Richard Green over 2012 to ensure we cover more breaking news, warnings and storm alerts – and he’s another forecaster to answer your questions here at WeatherWatch.co.nz and over on our very active Facebook page.

Your Support
Last year you clicked on 4.5 million pages here at WeatherWatch.co.nz and we had almost 2 million visits to the site (click here for more information).  WeatherWatch.co.nz was created for the public of New Zealand and much of the content – such as photos and even breaking news – comes from you, our loyal readers.  We appreciate your support and will continue to provide this free service for 2012 and beyond.  

Now, if only we could fix this summer weather…..!

Cheers – from the WeatherWatch.co.nz Team