Smart weather services at planning stage

If you want to enjoy the sunset near West Lake, misty rain in the waterfront towns of Jiangnan or fireflies in the firefly-themed park in Pinghu, a planned smart integrated weather service platform for the Yangtze River Delta may help.

The platform will also be able to provide meteorological support for transport, agriculture, anti-pollution measures, gardening and people’s daily lives in the region through latest technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and machine learning.

According to the Shanghai Meteorological Bureau, a feasibility report has been completed with the weather authorities of Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces.

All are now working together to build a weather support system for the Yangtze River Delta Ecology and Greenery Demonstration Zone as a trial run.

The system will have meteorological data merged with the data of city operations in the demonstration zone, covering Jiangsu's Wujiang, Zhejiang’s Jiashan and Shanghai's Qingpu. It's designed with nine subsystems which have different functions, including flood warning, transport support, air pollution prevention, green agriculture, ecological tourism and health services.

"Now we are designing all these systems and if the program goes smoothly, it can be put into construction next year and people in the demonstration zone can have access to it in 2022," said Feng Lei, deputy head and spokesman of the bureau.

Feng said parts have been realized in some areas of the Yangtze River Delta and they will upgrade these services in the demonstration zone.

"Previously, our weather service for transport mainly focused on road traffic. But now, we should be concerned with the needs of logistics in the whole Yangtze River Delta," Feng told Shanghai Daily. "For example, goods are unloaded at the Yangshan Deep Water Port and go to Ningbo port by sea. Then they are sent to southern Zhejiang on highway and later maybe they will board the train. Now we will provide you with a series of services all the way."

For the environment, the weather authorities will evaluate the air quality, water quality, plants' capacity on carbon sequestration and oxygen release, greenery coverage and other ecological indexes as well as developing products to monitor the condition of water plants.

Meanwhile, the system will tell users where and when they can experience beautiful sunset and misty rain. It will predict the blooming of different kinds of flowers.

It will also warn about diseases such as heatstroke and other conditions that might affect the elderly.