A travellers weather toolkit

See what's on offer by clicking this link.

Want to keep up with the weather, but don't have your computer nearby? A very scaled down Australian Weather News is now available on your mobile. Note that the files are deliberately small and simple to keep download times and cost low.

AWN Mobile is organised by weather forecast district, and provides town and city forecasts and the past two hours of observations from all automatic weather stations in that district. Two clicks takes you to all the information for any area. The format is designed to fit comfortably on a standard small mobile phone screen. A limited set of charts is also available, including radar images for all areas.

To connect you need to use your mobile phone's web facility and be able to access the external internet. This can require hunting around the menus on some phones that are part of packages that deliberately try to make you use your telco's favoured providers. You are looking for external links or a similar phrase. To go to AWN Mobile initially, key in the address http://www.australianweathernews.com/mobile/. Then bookmark the address as you would on your computer.

Town and city forecasts are as provided by the Bureau of Meteorology and range from single day forecasts for small centres to 4-day forecasts for larger centres and 7-day forecasts for capital cities.

Automatic weather station observations are provided for every AWS for the current and previous hour, so you can see the trend of the weather. The observations give temperature, humidity, wind and gustiness, and rainfall since 9am.

Charts and radar images are also available, though they may not work on all phones, especially those with small screens. Static radar images -- both high scale (128km radius) and low scale (256km radius) -- are available for all areas, and there is a basic set of current and forecast charts. There are also satellite cloud images and a simple lightning tracker. Your phone will probably try to shrink these onto its screen, but look around for a "desktop" or similar option that allows you to view them full size by moving around using left/right/up/down arrows if these are provided on your keypad.

I'd welcome any feedback on the service -- use the feedback link above -- but no technical questions about your phone please.