We can expect a new, powerful version of 7Timer! come into being later this year! As the 35km resolution data had been put into use in Feburary, it's now possible for us to upgrade the whole big model for a better performance. So now I'll give a "preview" of the new, powerful 7Timer!.

  There would mainly be three products:

  • 72-hour, local astronomical-class. It likes the "7Timer!-Panel2" very much, but only forecast 72-hour at a scale of 3 hours (or 60-hour? Not yet decide). It would also have forecast elements like cloud cover, seeing, transparency, etc, but the model will be upgraded. There's possibly that it would have a "atmospheric stability", from this you may know the possiblity of a particular shower. This element may be very useful during summer night. Other useful elements such as sky background maybe added. Output graph would be re-designed, as some users reported it's hard to use and not easy to recognize its elements.
  • 384-hour, local daily use. It just like those common forecasts in our daily life, but it will use relatively high resolution data for forecast (0-180 hours would be 35km at a time scale of 3 hours, 192-384 hours would be 175km at a time scale of 12 hours as it's just a "trend" forecast). Elements such as precipitation, temperature, humidity, wind would be there. There may also be a kind of "sky conditions" which tell you the cloud cover, for it maybe useful for you to decide whether to put on a hat to protect sunlight. Visiblity (quite alike "transparency" in the astronomical-class forecast) may also appeared. High time resolution (generaly 3-hour), exellent coverage (any place at anywhere over the world -- you could just request one for your own place, no need to find a nearby big city and see its forecast), exellent time coverage (16 days, and it's free), made it superior to other similar weather services.
  • 384-hour, multiple elements, weather maps. Similar to the "Weather Map" service now, but there would be more elements, longer time coverage up to 384-hour (16 days).

  After the repairments of the Auto-run Program (ArP), server administrator confirmed the program won't bring any majoy bugs to the server, and allow ArP to have some upgrade. So there may be two runs on each day, 00Z and 12Z. First batch would be proceed from 4h to 8h30m UT, and the products would released around 8-9hUT; the second batch would be proceed from 16h to 20h30m UT, and the products would be released round 20-21h UT. The whole website and control files would be rewrite, as I have many big progress these weeks in php field (:-P). I'm confidence I'm now able to conduct some "big" php projects. (Actually, some big projects had been done in recent months)

  The plan is big, you see, and I expect at least two or three months would be spent until we can see its Alpha release, I'll report the progress here. This project is now started yet, and it maybe started in mid or late May.