About Huafeng Meteorological Media Group

Huafeng Meteorological Media Group

Overview

The Huafeng Meteorological Media Group, known in Chinese as Huafeng Qixiang Chuanmei Jituan and formally as the Beijing Huafeng Group of Meteorological Audio and Video Information, is a Beijing-based weather information and media enterprise affiliated with the China Meteorological Administration, or CMA, China's national meteorological service. It is the organisation behind much of the weather broadcasting seen in China: the CMA and Huafeng produce weather broadcasts for China Central Television, CCTV, and for other consumer and enterprise clients, and Huafeng undertakes the operation of China Weather TV, the country's dedicated meteorological television channel. It also produces weather content for online, mobile and automotive products. Huafeng's position is unusual internationally. In many countries, television weather is produced by broadcasters buying data and graphics from commercial providers; in China, the public meteorological service's own media group produces the broadcasts, operates the specialist channel, and — through a joint venture with AccuWeather — runs the CMA's official China Weather mobile application and public web meteorological services. Huafeng is therefore simultaneously a media producer, a channel operator and the commercial distribution arm for official Chinese weather information.

Affiliation with the China Meteorological Administration

Huafeng is a CMA-affiliated enterprise — described in different sources as a division of the CMA, a subsidiary of the China Meteorological Administration, and as the CMA-affiliated Huafeng Meteorological Media Group. The CMA is the authoritative national voice for weather forecasts and warnings in China, responsible for disseminating that information in a timely manner to those who need it. Huafeng's role within that system is communication and media: turning the CMA's forecasts, warnings and data into television programmes, digital products and services that reach the public and business clients. The CMA's own account of Huafeng's tenth anniversary celebration, held in Beijing on 28 August 2012, shows how the administration framed that role. CMA Administrator Zheng Guoguang told the gathering that Huafeng should stick to the direction of public meteorological service, put people first, build the brand of public meteorological service, and become an important window for China's disaster reduction and prevention and its response to climate change. He said that over the preceding decade Huafeng had given priority to meteorological disaster prevention and reduction, information communication and popular-science publicity, and he called on it to improve the quality, coverage, audience ratings and influence of its programmes. Guests at the event included representatives of the Ministry of Civil Affairs and of CCTV, reflecting the two worlds Huafeng connects: disaster management and national broadcasting.

Weather broadcasts for CCTV and other clients

Huafeng's best-known work is the weather programming carried by CCTV. Technology reporting on its systems stated plainly that the CMA and Huafeng produce all weather broadcasts for China Central Television and other consumer and enterprise clients, so that the forecast television presentations seen throughout China are produced through Huafeng. Chinese reporting on the familiar evening weather programme broadcast after CCTV's main news has made the same point from the presenters' side: the programme is prepared by the Huafeng Group, and its hosts belong to Huafeng rather than being CCTV presenters paid by the broadcaster. The scale of production is substantial. Huafeng has used software solutions from Weather Central since 2006 — Weather Central was acquired in 2012 and became part of The Weather Company — and was reported to produce more than 70 weather presentations a day. Those presentations serve national channels and other clients rather than a single bulletin: the same forecast must be rendered for different channels, regions, times of day and formats, each with its own maps, graphics and presenters. That production volume is what makes Huafeng a media group rather than a small programme unit, and it explains its investment in data and graphics technology described below.

China Weather TV

Huafeng's flagship channel is China Weather TV, in Chinese Zhongguo Tianqi Pindao. The channel was established by the China Meteorological Administration and began broadcasting on 18 May 2006; it is undertaken by the Huafeng Meteorological Video Information Group. It was the first meteorological television channel in China, providing meteorological information and related life-service information around the clock. Its stated purpose is summed up in its own formulation: prevent disasters, serve people. It provides public meteorological services and services for preventing meteorological disasters — the two functions the CMA itself emphasises, since in China severe weather including typhoons, floods and heatwaves makes forecast communication a part of disaster management and not only a convenience for viewers. Huafeng's 24-hour weather channel is powered by The Weather Company's broadcast solutions, linking the channel's output to the same technology partnership that supports its other television production. A dedicated national weather channel, operated by the meteorological service's own media group, gives China a distribution asset few countries possess: a channel on which warnings, explanations and preparedness information can be carried continuously during severe weather, under the control of the organisation that issues the forecasts.

Technology: Weather Central, The Weather Company and DataCloud

Producing dozens of weather presentations a day for national television requires systems that can ingest national datasets and render them quickly and consistently. Huafeng's technology history reflects that need. It had used software solutions from Weather Central since 2006, the year China Weather TV launched; Weather Central was acquired in 2012 and became a subsidiary within The Weather Company. The Weather Company International later helped Huafeng complete installation of DataCloud, its proprietary big-data management solution for national meteorological agencies, making China an early leader in the integration of that system. The CMA and Huafeng were to use DataCloud to power weather content sent to clients across television, online, mobile and automotive products. The system's purpose was to present the country's weather datasets in a simplified format for better weather visualisation, forecasting, warning dissemination and public communication through television or digital platforms, and the addition of DataCloud was to incorporate The Weather Company's own data and forecast model alongside Chinese data. The Weather Company said it catered to more than 35 clients throughout China, including national — Huafeng — provincial and city-level CMA offices, producing hundreds of weather presentations daily seen by more than 600 million viewers. Those figures, from the technology provider, underline the reach of the production system in which Huafeng is the national-level operator.

The 2013 AccuWeather cross-licensing agreement

Huafeng's international partnerships extended beyond graphics technology. On 30 January 2013, AccuWeather International announced a cross-licensing agreement with Huafeng Innovative Network Technology Co. under which AccuWeather content would become available to its device-manufacturing partners in China across digital media and any device with an Internet Protocol address, while Huafeng, as a subsidiary of the China Meteorological Administration, would supply weather service products from China to AccuWeather across all digital media. AccuWeather's chief executive, Barry Lee Myers, said the pact would eliminate uncertainty for digital device makers and distributors about who to deal with in relation to weather information from or to China. Under the deal, weather for China locations requested from anywhere a user was located globally would first return China-sourced weather information, filled in with AccuWeather data. The agreement is an early marker of the role Huafeng came to play: the authorised channel through which official Chinese weather information reached global digital platforms, and through which a global provider's content was licensed for distribution inside China. It set the pattern for the deeper joint venture that followed two years later.

The Huafeng-AccuWeather joint venture of 2015

In May 2015, the CMA-affiliated Huafeng Meteorological Media Group and AccuWeather formed a joint venture, Huafeng-AccuWeather Meteorological Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. The World Meteorological Organization, describing the arrangement as an innovative meteorological service model, called it an innovative public-private partnership. The CMA assigned the operation of its official China Weather mobile application and the provision of public web-based meteorological services to the newly created company. AccuWeather later described the joint venture as the only company sanctioned under the Meteorological Law of China to distribute a full and detailed set of official weather information and forecasts of the China Meteorological Administration together with AccuWeather's forecasting techniques — a description that captures the venture's privileged position as the official digital gateway to Chinese weather data. The joint venture's first product was RealFeel, an apparent-temperature product combining meteorological elements such as temperature, ultraviolet radiation and wind speed with knowledge of how humans experience those elements, subdivided into real feel in shade and real feel in wind. In a second stage it developed precipitation-phase prediction products, giving forecasts of rainfall, snowfall and sleet and analysing the impact of different precipitation phases on travel, transportation and electricity, with a lead time of 15 days, and it also developed services with long lead-time, 90-day, forecasts.

Digital distribution and partners

Through Huafeng-AccuWeather, official Chinese forecasts and warnings were made available worldwide: the venture's application programming interface automatically provides forecasts and warnings globally in more than 100 languages, sharing meteorological information and assisting global disaster risk prevention and mitigation, according to the World Meteorological Organization's account. Domestically, distribution was strengthened through partnerships with mobile vendors, allowing weather features to be built into mobile phones as plug-ins. The partners named in that account include China's three telecommunications operators — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — and Internet service providers such as Baidu and Yidianzixun. The venture reported a stable number of app users and a rapid increase in page views of its mobile website. This distribution network is the digital counterpart of Huafeng's television reach: just as its broadcasts carry CMA forecasts to CCTV audiences, its joint venture carries the same official information into phones, websites and, through the multilingual interface, to users and platforms outside China. For device makers and platforms, dealing with Huafeng or its joint venture became the route to licensed, official Chinese weather content — the certainty the 2013 agreement had promised.

Public service: disaster prevention and science communication

Running through the CMA's statements about Huafeng is a public-service mandate that distinguishes it from a purely commercial weather company. At its tenth anniversary in 2012, the CMA leadership stressed that Huafeng had given priority to meteorological disaster prevention and reduction, information communication and popular-science publicity, and had made great contributions to promoting meteorological services. China Weather TV's own stated purpose — prevent disasters, serve people — expresses the same priority, and the channel's brief includes public meteorological service and meteorological disaster prevention service. That mandate shapes the group's output: alongside daily forecasts it carries warnings and explanatory, science-based content intended to help the public understand and act on weather risks. The World Meteorological Organization's interest in the Huafeng-AccuWeather model points in the same direction: it presented the partnership as a way of restructuring and streamlining meteorological services and boosting expertise in developing and disseminating them, while the national service remained the authoritative voice for forecasts and warnings. Huafeng is the dissemination machinery of that system — the part of China's meteorological service that the public actually sees and hears.

Position and significance

The Huafeng Meteorological Media Group occupies a position with few direct equivalents abroad: a national meteorological administration's own media enterprise that produces the weather broadcasts of the national broadcaster, operates the country's first and dedicated 24-hour weather channel, and co-owns the joint venture entrusted with the official weather app, public web services and worldwide digital distribution of China's official forecasts in more than 100 languages. Its partnerships trace the opening of Chinese weather information to global technology and platforms under official control — Weather Central and The Weather Company for broadcast technology and data handling from 2006 onwards, AccuWeather first for cross-licensing in 2013 and then as joint-venture partner from 2015. For a directory of media and information agencies, Huafeng is best understood as the media arm of the China Meteorological Administration: an organisation whose product is not the forecast itself, which remains the CMA's, but the communication of that forecast — on television, online, on mobile and in cars — to an audience numbered in the hundreds of millions.