Software engineering in the design of a weather-nowcast system

National Meteorological Offices are largely concerned with synoptic forecasting where weather predictions are produced for a whole country for 24 hours ahead. In practice, many local organisations (such as emergency services, sports, farming, forestry, and construction industries) require only local, short-term, bespoke, weather predictions and warnings. The paper presents original research which shows that these less-demanding requirements do not require exceptional computing power and can be met by a modern, desk-top system which monitors site-specific ground data (such as temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction, etc.) augmented with readily available satellite images for above-ground information. The paper discusses the design of such a system and specifically addresses the necessary software engineering