Tailoring weather information for specific users

In June 2018 at Slovenian Environmental Agency (ARSO) the internal project SPOMIN was started. In Slovenia, weather forecasters have only one operational shift per day, which lasts 12 hours, and only one weather forecaster is mostly responsible for general forecasts for the entire country. Dedicated forecasts for special users are fragmented and delegated to teams across the Agency; in most cases there is only one person responsible for each specific topic, and some forecasts for specific activities are not even produced, for example for leisure activities, skiing, surfing, etc. Therefore, the aim of SPOMIN project was to harmonize operational meteorological information and forecasts and collect their production in one team.

For the SPOMIN proposes, we issued a questionnaire addressed to our users and received more than 1000 answers, many of them were descriptive. Many of our users are familiar with our special products for users, but they are missing additional graphic representation or explanatory text or more details related to their activity. There are also some of users who are unaware of our products as they are not easy to find on our websites. Our users know what kind of information and forecasts they are missing, and they provided us with a lot of ideas how to improve our products and which new products should we develop in future. Thus, the project team suggested some new products and upgrade of existing ones. While the project was finished in 2020, the conclusions and results were conveyed to the newly formed team for specific forecasts.

At present, we are not able to enrich the content of our web site with new kinds of information, because the web site is currently under renovation. To overcome this situation, we have started adding more information to the social network where we have over 20,000 followers, recording podcasts with highly relevant topics, producing lots of interesting infographics, and so on. Our plans for the future include production of videos with forecasts and meteorological educational content. Of course, we will upgrade and implement the ideas developed in SPOMIN project and integrate them on our new website which will be much more user oriented as it is the current one.

Selected examples of tailored information for users published on our social media will be presented.