Picture this, it’s 2001, the only light in the room is the cold glow of the phosphorous coating of the CRT. You’ve just finished watching —whether by choice or not — a foreign film with bold yellow subtitles and tasteful nudity. As the credits roll and promos run for another film bound to get you in trouble tomorrow night, you’re suddenly met with the blue green haze of a satellite image of Australia all while soft jazz gently drones on.

Need to jog your memory?

WeatherWatch, or to most that thing SBS used to play once the station closed for the night, was the adult version of the Prime Possum, the reminder that you should probably be in bed by now. It was the successor to the test pattern that played after station close, and much like its predecessor, played music over a static image with scrolling text advertising the CD being played.

The History

WeatherWatch premiered on the 24th of August 1993^[※]. Taking inspiration from US cable channels it was part of a larger effort to continue offering a dynamic programming schedule suitable to a wide variety of cultures, languages and tastes^[※].

SBS at the time, much like always, was facing criticism for its programming choices and WeatherWatch wasn’t exempt from this^[※].

Broadcast recordings of WeatherWatch pre-1998 are all but non existent, and anything post-1998 is few and far between.

At the time, weather programming in Australia was scant, it wasn’t until 1999 did a full time weather channel hit the air with Weather 21^[※] on the Austar network. This stands in contrast to the United States with The Weather Channel launching in the late 80’s^[※] and evidence to suggest that full time weather programming was around since the 50’s^[※].

It can be argued that The Weather Channel was the direct inspiration for WeatherWatch, besides the similar “weather + relaxing music” formula, in an interview Malcom Long the Managing Director of SBS when asked about the inspiration for WeatherWatch said “Have you any idea what the most watched pay-television channel in the United States is?”^[※]

But WeatherWatch was never just about the weather, in fact the weather was pretty much out of date by the time in got to broadcast^[※]. The music, however, wasn’t out of date, and it was easy to get your hands on. At least as early as 2001^[※] SBS began selling WeatherWatch branded records through the SBS Online Shop and in Dymocks^[※].

I refer here exclusively to CD’s released under the WeatherWatch label, as SBS had been advertising Decca and Verve records (sublabels of Universal Music) via it’s test pattern for many years prior^[※]. It wasn’t until after WeatherWatch premiered did these Decca and Verve CD’s begun being labelled in combination with the SBS WeatherWatch brand.

With this in mind, the music, seems to be the driving force behind WeatherWatch.

Why?

Well, John Derry has been credited as the person behind the concept of WeatherWatch^[※]. John didn’t operate in the role of a producer or general management at SBS. John was, at least in 2004, the merchandising manager for SBS^[※]. But John wasn’t in it alone, the SBS series concept is attributed to both John Derry and Cyrus Meher-Homji^[※].

Who is Cyrus Meher-Homji? Well, from 1998 Cyrus was the Marketing Manager for Classics and Jazz^[※] at none other than Universal Music Australia.

Was WeatherWatch just a scheme cooked up by Marketing and Merchandising managers to line the pockets of their bosses by selling CD’s? It’s probably not, but I’ll let you be the judge.

The Prestige

I have to come clean, I’ve been hiding something from you. What we know as WeatherWatch, what has been discussed and recorded online as WeatherWatch, may not be WeatherWatch at all.

You see on the 16th of Aug 1993, The Canberra Times, featured an article in “The Guide” about the premiere of World Watch and WeatherWatch, and in it they quote that “SBS will begin screening WeatherWatch a four-hour continuous musical weather service that means that weather details from Australia and around the world will be available…”^[※] what’s strange about this is that in all recorded broadcasts of “WeatherWatch” only the satellite image of Australia is shown, never weather from “around the world”.

Supporting that, at it’s premiere at 11am on the 24th of August the synopsis for WeatherWatch reads “A continuously updated weather report, bringing Australians the latest weather conditions around the world and a selection of music”^[※]. This runs again in contrast to all the recorded broadcasts.

It seems odd to me that “WeatherWatch” has been pitched exclusively with the proviso of “weather from around the globe” yet all records from the time show the weather exclusively from Australia.

It’s not just in description that we find discrepancies, but also in the schedule that it is being broadcast. All recordings of “WeatherWatch” from 1993 onwards are made after the station has signed off for the night, not in the morning, not in the afternoon, but overnight. This in contrast to multiple TV guides^[※] from the time period, which list WeatherWatch & Music as a daytime broadcast and when matching these guides to the recordings, what is scheduled at that time is usually listed in the TV guides as “Close” or simply nothing at all.

In fact there are multiple recordings^[※] of what we have been referring to as “WeatherWatch” not having “WeatherWatch” scheduled at all in the guides for that day^[※], a phantom broadcast perhaps? Or not WeatherWatch to being with?

WeatherWatch did show weather from around the globe in the form of live cameras^[※], but the earliest recording of this I can find is from 2007^[※]. In addition no daytime broadcasts of “WeatherWatch & Music” prior to this date have been found showing what this looked like.

Is this station close “WeatherWatch” really WeatherWatch or is it a merely an evolution of the test pattern played in years prior with a satellite image of Australia instead of the Phillip Circle Test Pattern.

On the other hand, to make the case that this is indeed WeatherWatch, the guides stop referring to this imposter as “Close” and instead start referring to it as “WeatherWatch Overnight”^[※]. This also lines up with the booklet from the WeatherWatch CD “Once upon a summertime” which states “Overnight, in the early morning and early afternoon, ‘WeatherWatch is a continuously updated weather report on SBS Television bringing viewers the latest weather conditions from around Australia…”^[※]. This compilation is from 2001, eight years after the premiere of WeatherWatch, but does lend credence to the fact that this is indeed WeatherWatch, albeit in a slightly different form to what is was pitched as.

With all of this in mind, my working theory is this: In 1993 when SBS launched WeatherWatch they took the test pattern they played overnight (with music) and replaced it with the satellite image of Australia. This was separate from the daytime broadcast of WeatherWatch, and wasn’t considered anything other than something to keep the transmitter warm after station close. Because of the partnership with Universal Music it then made sense to then advertise the WeatherWatch CD’s used in the daytime broadcast as opposed to the generic Decca and Verve records advertised with the traditional test pattern. Over time, as part of some brand consolidation effort, or to match viewer expectations, this then retroactively became known as “WeatherWatch Overnight” as early as 2001.

Recreating WeatherWatch

All of this is in service to a somewhat faithful recreation of whatever the hell played after station close. For my own sanity I will refer to it as WeatherWatch.

You can check out the livestream here. I don’t know how long this will stay up given the copyrighted nature of the content, but should it go down, I will host a version in the project section of my site. All code will be published once I’ve tidied it up a bit, but feel free to reach out if you don’t mind the mess.

Because WeatherWatch changed it’s spots so frequently, I’ve arbitrarily selected the 2003-2004 incarnation of the program to pay homage to.

The Satellite Image

The WeatherWatch satellite image (the one I’m recreating), is likely from GMS-5^[※] AKA Himawari a Geostationary Meteorological Satellite. This was the satellite that the Bureau of Meteorology used at the time^[※], along with various other educational institutions^[※]. The images directly from the satellite aren’t as they appear on WeatherWatch but rather have gone through a series of processing steps.

The images fresh off the satellite are full disc infrared images, that is, it’s and image of the whole side of the globe, but we are just interested in a section of it. Thus the full disc image is cropped, coloured and some text added to get to what we see in WeatherWatch

In fact, SBS likely did none of this themselves, identical images to the one we see in live broadcast can be found on old versions of the Bureaus website^[※].

BOM Image

Because of the identical image and the Bureaus existing partnership with their Japanese counterparts, we can be confident that we are indeed looking at images from GMS-5.

In order to replicate this image, I’ve taken the latest satellite images from current satellites in geostationary orbit above Australia. The pick of the litter is Himawari 9, part of the 3rd generation of Himawari satellites and as such a descendant of GMS-5^[※]. The only other reasonable alternative is the Korean GEO-KOMPSAT 2A.

Himawari 9 is the obvious choice as it is close to the same longitude that GMS-5 was orbiting above, GMS-5 being 140° E^[※] and Himawari 9 being 140.7° E^[※]. This is important as if the satellite is at different lines of longitude, then Australia won’t appear in the same place relative to the full disc image, i.e. it will be shifted to the left or right.

This is the case with GEO-KOMPSAT 2A a Korean satellite, this is at 128.2° E^[※]. Subsequently, Australia is shifted slightly to right compared to the images from GMS-5 or Himawari 9.

Then go with images from Himawari 9 I hear you shout. I hate to disappoint but images from Himawari 9^[※] available online are significantly lower quality than what we can get from GK-2A^[※], this is not a limitation due to the hardware onboard the satellite, but rather an issue of access.

Firstly the Japanese Meteorological Agency doesn’t provide full disc raw infrared images online for anyone to grab, rather you need access to Himawari Cloud^[※], a service which distributes images to organisations across the satellites area of coverage. Unfortunately a hobbyist project like this won’t count. Other institutions who have access to Himawari Cloud do publish their images online, but they are either too low quality, or have already been processed in ways that don’t match WeatherWatch.

Secondly, many weather satellites are available for hobbyists to receive images from directly with fairly cheap hardware. Take the GOES satellites, with a $30 RTL-SDR and a coat-hanger^[※] can have you receiving images directly from a satellite in orbit.

Cutting out the middle man in this way is great as you can receive an image with highest possible quality, and minimal to no processing. This would be ideal for Himawari 9, unfortunately, this is not currently possible.

Which leads me back to GK-2A. Ignoring that it isn’t in the perfect position for our use case, you can receive images from it directly. You will need a bit more than a coat-hanger, and Sam from VKSDR has a great write up on receiving images on his blog. Due to it’s relative approachability, high quality raw images online are easier to come by. Not only that but when we consider the longevity of this project, it also opens up the possibility of my own setup and not have to rely on a 3rd party to provide the images.

With all that considered, I’ve decided to stick with GK-2A, it’s not ideal, but it’s good enough.

Processing the image

With the images secured we can move onto processing.

I want to start this off by saying the processing done here is exclusively focused on looks, not on meteorological accuracy. I know enough about the process to know that I know nothing, and as such will be focusing on making pretty pictures rather than accurate ones.

To do this, it’s rather trivial, crop the image to the area of interest, add colours, add meridian lines, add coastal outlines, add a black background. This is done in python and is trivial to implement using Pillow and Basemap.

You can generate the meridian and coastal outlines with:

from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.figure(figsize=(10,10), frameon=False)

m = Basemap(projection='geos',lon_0=128.2,resolution='h',rsphere=(6378137.00,6356752.3142))

m.drawcoastlines(color='white')

m.drawparallels(np.arange(-90.,120.,8.), color='white', dashes=[20,13])
m.drawmeridians(np.arange(0.,420.,8.), color='white', dashes=[1,0])

plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig('lines.png', dpi=300, transparent=True, pad_inches=0)

For the colours, I sampled the colours in the grid at the left of the WeatherWatch image, and applied them pixel by pixel depending on the greyscale value of the pixel, again using the Pillow library.

I also add the text at this stage, based on the time and date that the image was taken but will talk more about that in the next section.

The Text

Let’s start with the text at the bottom of the satellite image.

The text really looks like a myriad of bitmap fonts from days gone by. I did try and find the hardware that this was created with but information on WeatherWatch is scant enough as it is.

All is not lost though, the closest match I could find is IBM CGA using the THE OLDSCHOOL PC FONT RESOURCE^[※] and it’s an almost perfect match. The only discrepancy, the text seems to be slightly stretched, take a look below.

Font Comparison

Given the small resolution there are only so many combinations of pixels that can come together to form legible text, and without any further understanding of the software/hardware used originally, something that is near perfect, is better than nothing.

In other news, the scrolling text is different across many years of WeatherWatch’s broadcast. Even with the satellite image not changing, the font, the spacing, timing, drop shadow all change.

Font Differences

WeatherWatch in the years 2003-2004 seem to use the top and bottom fonts the most, with only the drop shadow changing slightly. With some basic font sleuthing we can be reasonably confident in saying that our font is Helvetica.

The Music

Finally, the music! I’ve waffled on about it already and you are right to assume that is coming from WeatherWatch branded CD’s.

To find WeatherWatch CD’s I’ve been cross referencing archives of the SBS shop page^[※] with eBay listings of said CD, if the CD has visible WeatherWatch branding, then it’s up for grabs. You can also check the available broadcast recordings to see what CD’s are being played, however, given the lack of available broadcasts, this will only get you so far.

There is a question of what does and doesn’t make the cut. WeatherWatch CD’s were realised over a long period, and what played in 2004 certainly wasn’t played in 1993. Despite this I’ve chosen to ignore the release date, given I will be broadcasting WeatherWatch 24/7, I don’t want to be limited by the content of the time and rather have variety, opposed to accuracy.

Putting it all together.

With that, we have all the pieces to complete our homage to WeatherWatch. You can check out the livestream here, I’m not sure how long it’s going to be up but I will do my best to keep it online for as long as possible.

I do want to address a list of shortcomings, things which I know aren’t perfectly accurate but have decided against implementing properly. This is just so you don’t email me telling me that I missed something. If it’s not in the list below or you can improve on the current implementation, then please email me!

• Satellite position.
• Colour gradient.
• Colour application.
• Font width.
• Music release year.
• Music playback order.
• Scrolling text frequency.

Conclusion

It’s been a strange journey getting to this point. In some way answering all my questions about WeatherWatch almost feels like I’ve lost something. The mysterious program that played in the wee hours, is no longer so mysterious. It’s been broken down into a process, into a series of discrete steps to Frankenstein a hollow farce.

In other ways it feels good to know that, despite it’s shortcoming, WeatherWatch can live on.