Some of you may have noticed a new feature show up in Weather Defender this week. We are now providing the Full Bulletin Text Summaries of Watches, Warnings, and Advisories right inside the Weather Defender interface.

click to enlarge

How it Works

Bulletin Text is accessible via a new icon that appears over top of Watches, Warnings, or Advisories layers, found in the Winter Weather map (or you can add them to any other map from the Layer Browser). The icon looks like this:

When you move your mouse over the icon, you will get a description of the active bulletin, along with valid start-end times:

Finally, clicking on the icon will bring up the full bulletin summary:

What's in a Bulletin?

Bulletin Summaries are written by NWS forecasters and contain a lot of useful information about the details of a particular watch/warning/advisory.  They will tell you:

• The synoptic pattern (general weather situation) that is causing a particular hazard
• The exact times when weather will be most threatening
• Specific locations which are most threatened
• In some cases, like flooding or snow-related hazards, the amount of water or snowfall expected

Full-text bulletins are now available for Storm Watches and Mesoscale Discussions layers. Like with Warning Polygons, a blue icon will appear near the edge of each watch:

Click the blue icon to display the full bulletin text from the Storm Prediction Center:

Those of you who have been long-time customers know we are very open to suggestions and improvements. This is a product for you, after all!

	Surface Pressure HG The original Surface Pressure layer has been enahced to provide an alternate with readings in Hg, inches mercury, rather than Millibars. Requested By: Raymond Heinmiller Available Under: Surface Weather category
	Dewpoint Plots A new layer depicting the Dewpoint readings only in degrees farhenheit is now available. Requested By: John Bagioni Available Under: Surface Weather category

Do you have a suggestion for a new layer or improvement?

• Small request such as modifying existing layers are the easiest can usually be implemented right away
• If you have a larger feature request, we'd still like to hear about it but know that it may take awhile to implement (probably the next version release)