HortPlus.com

MetWatch Software

The award winning MetWatch software provides quick and easy interpretation of weather data for use in horticultural management decision making. Use MetWatch to interpret weather data for up to the hour information on disease risk, and for general crop management information including heat accumulation and winter chilling.

MetWatch is designed with you in mind - minimum time in the office, maximum value information.

Hourly weather data can be sourced from a wide range of weather stations giving critical disease risk information when you need it. For detailed information on the 50+ available weather stations around the country that you can access, go to our Weather Station Networkpage. Subscribe to the optional forecast, and MetWatch will forecast likely disease risk, and provide an assessment of how conducive the forecast weather conditions are for spraying.

MetWatch software can also help you to document the decision making process - helping you to meet requirements of various Integrated Production programs and EurepGAP.

Features

• A graphical display of weather data and disease risk that is easy to understand and interpret.
• Import hourly weather information from a range of commercially available weather stations to give up-to-the-hour disease risk assessments and crop management information.
• Import and display forecast hourly weather information, providing an integrated display of forecast disease risk assessment, preceding disease events, and forecast spray conditions.
• Hourly and daily weather summaries in table and graph format including heat unit accumulations, rainfall accumulations, and chill hours.
• Flexible format that allows the user to change the number of days displayed, the canopy-drying period, leaf wetness thresholds, heat unit accumulation threshold and other options specific to each disease model.
• Display text information such as spray diary information on the same graph displaying weather and disease information.
• Optimized coding to achieve little or no loading time.

Weather Forecasts

Weather forecasting information is provided by MetService - New Zealands premier provider of weather forecasting services.

A question we are commonly asked is "How accurate is the forecast?", a difficult question to answer. It is asked so often that we decided to cover it in the monthly 'Weather Sense' column that we provide for the Orchardist magazine. The article is titled 'Weather Forecast Accuracy' and is split over 4 consecutive months from March to June in 2009. These articles along with all the other 'Weather Sense' columns are available on the Resources area of the website

Hour-by-Hour (High Precision) Forecast

Region	Number of sub-areas forecast
Auckland & Northland	3
Bay of Plenty	2
Gisborne	2
Hawke's Bay	7
Nelson	4
Marlborough	5
Canterbury	4
Central Otago	3
Other	4

10-Day Forecast

Weather Map

Disease Management

HortPlus MetWatch software unleashes the power of hourly weather station data and hour-by-hour weather forecast information using sophisticated disease risk assessment models. Disease risk assessment models interpret weather data giving information on recent disease behavior as well as predicted disease risk. Different versions of HortPlus MetWatch are available for different crops:

Crop Management

Crop management information is available to all users of MetWatch through the daily weather summaries including growing degree days and chill unit calculations. Growing Degree Day and Winter Chilling data provide critical information for many crop management decisions, and are excellent for making between season comparisons.

You can choose to view the table of values or graph the results where you can add additional plots for comparison. Also like most of the MetWatch features, the daily summaries include a copy button to transfer the summary data to a speadsheet or word processor for further analysis and inclusion in reports.

Importing Data

If you have your own weather data and you would like to use the MetWatch software analysis and risk assessment tools with it, you can! The MetWatch software can import data from almost any source for you to take advantage of. There is a generic weather data import feature to cater to custom formats, and dedicated import wizards for:

• HortPlus Temperature & Humidity MicroLogger data.
• Campbell Scientific weather stations.
• WeatherPro weather stations.
• TinyTag data.

Note: if you import a lot of weather data, we recommend the professional license so you can create the QUE file to store the data in.

Which MetWatch is best for me?

Generally MWOL is your best option, but if you need to import your own data or do other things with the weather data like reports, you may be better off with the MetWatch Software.

If you are not sure which product is best for you, we suggest the first this you do is sign up for a free trial of MetWatch Online.

MetWatch Software

MetWatch OnLine (MWOL)

MetWatch Daily Reports (MDR)

Professional Version

The MetWtach software also come in a professional version, with a few additional benefits. Its generally aimed at scientists, those with their own weather station, or those that plan to use MetWatch to assist them with reports.

Disease event summary

Custom screen capture

Create QUE files

Pricing

MetWatch is sold in a number of variations so that you only need to pay for the disease and crop management information you require.

The weather station access licence is an annual subscription. The weather station subscription "year" ends 31st of May regardless of subscription start date (no prorata). Weather station subscription price range from $225 - $290, please enquire for prices.

Product Kits	NZ Customers ($NZ)	International Customers ($US)
Metwatch Software Starter Kit 1 x MetWatch Software. 1 x Annual single weather station licence. 1 x Annual subscription to forecasts	$1025.00	n/a
Individual Products	NZ Customers ($NZ)	International Customers ($US)
MetWatch Software	$325.00	ask us
MetWatch Software (Professional) Aimed at Scientists, Weather station owners.	$780.00	ask us
Forecast Access Annual subscription includes all forecasts	$455.00	n/a
Weather Station Access Annual subscription per station	ask us	n/a
Apple Ascospore Module	$150.00	ask us

All prices are GST exclusive.

Payment and Shipping

Your order will be shipped as soon as we receive your payment in full. Domestic and international orders will be shipped via NZ Post or NZ Couriers at our discretion.

Cheque

Visa/Master Card

Direct Credit

Returns Policy

HortPlus stands behind its products. If you are not happy, we are not happy!

If a product is defective we will either replace it or refund the purchase price at your direction.

If for any other reason you are not entirely happy with your purchase and you would like to return it for full refund within 30 days of receipt, call us first then return the software, hardware, and any accompanying materials. For a full refund to be available any hardware must be returned in the same condition in which it was shipped to you.

Note that demo units are available for most of our products so you can try before you buy. We limit refunds to unit sales, eg if you are interested in purchasing 100 data loggers buy one and try before buying the 100!