Weather briefing using chat

The WMO Train the trainers’ online course is more than a wealth of knowledge and practical guidance from the trainers. As a participant, it has exposed me to a lot of resources and technology which I would never have imagined possible. In a view to teach about how to participate in an online weather briefing, I as a participant volunteered to host a weather chat briefing following in my trainer’s footsteps who hosted a more time specific and time bound weather briefing chat activity in Moodle for the discussions and Google presentation for sharing the images and commenting as well. My weather briefing chat activity was a little different;

It was an ongoing activity which kicked off with a short synchronous chat session and discussion of images on Google presentation but the room stayed open for annotations and updates for several hours.

This allowed for participants to log in anytime and join the discussion using the provided links. In this sort of presentation, I was not overwhelmed juggling between the images and the chat and it offered a great opportunity to discuss exhaustively an image before moving to the next image.

Screenshot of the weather briefing activity. 

For those who missed the briefing, they would be able to view the past sessions on Moodle and view the images later on Google presentation. It however did not miss to have its challenges such as internet speed which caused different delays in page loads, unstable connections and difficulties to access the Google Presentation.


After the session, I got encouraging feedback from some of the participants. Vesa from EUMETSAT said

 “(...) really nice initiative from you, was a pleasure to see it happen. I like the pace and easiness of this type of briefing, the images are there freely to browse, but you keep the discussion in control and return us to the correct slide under discussion when needed. This type of page could be running in my forecast office every day and help me keep in touch with other forecasters in the region.”

Roro from Jakarta, Indonesia said

 “(...) I found you did a great job in brief your audiences. I like the way you stop before every single slide, and typed the number of the slide you were talking about. That helped me to focus to the mentioned slide. With your "not to slow not too fast" pace, you help me to "digest" slide by slide. Thank you and I am thinking to propose a chat briefing as one of activities in our distance learning project.”

As Vesa said, it is a great initiative and I am looking forward to implementing and applying it for the African region.