Introduction

7Timer!, pronounced as "Tri-Timer", means "bell of clear sky" in Chinese. It is a series of meteorological forecast products. Most of the products base on a numeric weather model from NOAA/NCEP, called GFS, and aim on short-term (up to 16 days) weather forecast service for special purpose, for example, astronomical activities, or meteorological condition assessment. 7Timer! was first introduced in mid 2005 and has been revised for better fitting of public service operation in mid 2008. It's first designed as a weather forecast tool for astronomical purpose, as the author himself is a long-term astronomer and is always annoyed by fluky weather conditions.

Brief history

7Timer! was originally inspired from A. Danko's Clear Sky Chart. Differ from 7Timer!, Danko is using an internal model from CMC with about three times higher precision than GFS (which is a global model). After working for four weeks, 7Timer! was introduced into operation on July 18, 2005. By then, 7Timer! was the name of the website, and also the product (shown below). However, a new product called "Weather Chart" was added to 7Timer! later that year, and "7Timer!" became the name of a series of products.

As the user group of 7Timer! was growing gradually, there had been suggestions that 7Timer! should be upgraded in order to match a goal of convenient and advance service. Development for the revised system started in early 2008, and finished around mid-July. The service operation started on November 9, 2008.

Acknowlegements

I am very grateful to all kind people who have help this project so far, including Mr. Li Zuqiang (who had wrote the first version of Data Intiallization Pipeline), Dr. Johnson Lau (who had wrote a new data acquisition script and offered two machines for data interchange), Dr. Cui Chenzhou and Mr. Haiming Tang on behalf of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (for providing servers), and many others who have contributed money, suggestions or encouragements. It is really true that 7Timer! would not be what it looks like now without your helps. Thank you guys!