Ergon has developed the mobile application SwissRadar for MeteoSwiss, the national Swiss weather service. The application has been implemented as a JavaTM MIDlet which allows it to be used on a broad range of Java-enabled mobile phones of many vendors. SwissRadar allows viewing the current precipitation within the last 60 minutes as an image sequence. Precipitation is detected by MeteoSwiss using several radar stations, the data is processed on the meteo server and queried by the mobile application.
To see more detail for a certain region of the country, it is possible to zoom into the map and to select a location around which the map will be centred. In addition to the graphically animated data for the precipitation, the application is also able to display different observation data on the map, for example wind direction, wind speed, air temperature, sunshine duration and the time of the measurement.
On this page you can try the application without a mobile phone. The program which normally runs on the mobile phone is executed in an emulator, which simulates a Java-enabled mobile phone. The emulator itself is realized as a Java Applet which is started in your web browser. The demo version provided here does not show current data. The real version connects from the mobile phone via GPRS with the Meteo server, retrieves the current weather information within seconds and displays them. If you would like to try the application on your mobile phone, you find more detailed information at http://mobile.162.ch/.
