Future Marine

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Future Marine

• Charlie Paxton
• National Weather Service
• Tampa Bay Area, Florida

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This is a great opportunity!

• Collectively, we have the knowledge to envision
  the future and the resources to make it come
  true.

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Where do we start?

• Who are we doing this for?

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Who is our audience?
Mariners
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Who is our audience?Pleasure Boaters
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Who is our audience?Commercial Sipping
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Who is our audience?
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Who is our audience?Cruise Ships and Passengers
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Who is our audience?Fishing Industry
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Who is our audience?Water Sports Enthusiasts

• Sail Boarders
• Kayakers
• Swimmers
• Surfers

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Dude!
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What are they looking for?

• One stop shopping
• Easy navigation
• Simple detail
• Easy to interpret

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What are our goals?

• Complementary text and graphics.
• To show what is important!

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What is important to Marine interests?

• Marine Advisories, Statements, Warnings
• SCEC
• SCA
• Gale
• NOW
• MWS
• SMW

!
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What is important to Marine interests?

• Observations
• Buoy
• CMAN
• Land based
• Wind
• Seas
• Weather

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What is important to Marine interests?

• Graphical Forecasts
• Wind
• Wave
• Weather

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What is important to Marine interests?

• Web Page with easy navigation

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What is important to Marine interests?

• Easily readable Text

• Table or bullet form

• Flags indicate SCEC, SCA, GALE, etc

• Wind direction shown as arrow

• Weather icons

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What else is important to Marine interests?
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What else is important to Marine interests?
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What else is important to Marine interests?
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What else is important to Marine interests?
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How can we assemble all this into a neat slick
package thats easy to navigate one stop browsing?
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The magic of Flash!

• Professional high end vector graphics with
• Animation
• Sound
• Low bandwidth for fast downloads

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How its done

• A Flash generator template is developed and
  installed on a regional server
• WFOs generate component products using common
  names
• The Flash generator calls those files and
  incorporates them into a web file.

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Components of the pages.
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Building upon success

• "We have taken your hard work and great ideas
  and what you have beensuccessful in, and we took
  it, built upon it and incorporated it all into a
  universal marine weather page."

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Page Components Hazards
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Page ComponentsObservations
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Page ComponentsGFE Graphics
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Page ComponentsForecast Table
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Page ComponentsNavigation to other sites

• Clickable navigation

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Specialized help menus Show Beaufort scale
images of what various sea wind and weather
combinations look like.
Wind speed 48-55 kt, average 52 kt Swell Height
(ft) 22 Period (set) 9 Sea Criterion Very high
waves with long overhanging crests. The resulting
foam, in great patches, is blown in dense white
streaks along the direction of the wind. On the
whole, the surface of the sea takes on a white
appearance. The tumbling of the sea becomes heavy
and shocklike. Visibility affected.
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View Page in Browser
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Some Comments on the Page
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Screen Size

• Full screen width on a 600x800 display.
• Vertical length kept as short as possible
• No Scrolling for important information
• Watch, warning advisory
• Observations
• Graphical and text forecasts.
• Current usability studies indicate users have
  grown accustomed to scrolling down
• This does not hold true with horizontal
  scrolling, thus the page width was kept within
  the screen.

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Navigation

• Multiple navigation methods for almost every
  piece of information.
• The Hazards map links to a page that displays all
  hazard information about that zone.
• The observation map links to the web page that
  corresponds to that site (NDBC, PORTS, Mesonet,
  etc.), thus tying together several different
  networks into one page.

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Colors

• The soft green and tan page colors give a
  professional look, while not drawing any
  attention away from the weather information.
• Usability studies show that users first ignore
  the banner, and work their focus outward from the
  center.
• Therefore, the person's eyes will be drawn to the
  current advisories map -- exactly where we want
  them during a weather situation.

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Colors

• The background colors will probably be changed,
  along with the 'look' of the page at least once a
  year.
• It is a bigger challenge to make sure our pages
  stay up with the times, and that means not
  resting on a single look for too long.
• Most usability studies suggest 2 to 3 times per
  year

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Other Features

• Printable version to take on board.
• Options include
• html page
• plug-in such as Flash
• The Flash method renders a much nicer page.
• About 5 may not have the plug-in but its
  free.

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A Work in progress

• Develop a specific 256 color pallet to maximize
  the look of the page.
• Getting a copy of Generator to make png files
  with slick overlays. 1000
• Developing the actual page to list hazards for a
  zone. This will be done using a scripting lang.
  called PHP. This will probably be the easiest
  thing to do.

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Tides (in progress)

• Building tide information into a mySQL database.
• Writing a routine to ingest buoy and cman data
  into mySQL.

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Professionalism

• Professionalism is also important for another
  reason -- trust.
• The user experience is greatly affected by the
  IMPRESSION of professionalism, whether or not it
  actually exists.

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Professionalism

• If the page looks good, they instill greater
  trust in the information presented, and in the
  company represented.
• A good example of this is Amazon.com, which was
  a very small company but gave a much different
  impression through its presentation on the
  Internet.

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Benefits

• These ideas are well-thought out.
• This is one complete page to accommodate the
  customer, everyday.
• This page has been tested by the customers - this
  is what they wanted, asked for, and liked.

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More Benefits

• It's a one-stop shop.
• It's professional.
• Graphics are media ready

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Tip of the

• Template useable for
• Public
• Fire Weather
• Etc.

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The Future

• Personalize the product producers
• Web Casts
• Office Cams
• Beach Cams
• PDA Products
• VTIS Products

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Final Note

• With diligence and products that connect to our
  users, we can avert disasters such as this.

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Over and out