Nintendo today released the Weather Forecast channel for the Wii.  My optical drive slot was glowing to let me know Nintendo had sent me a message about the new channel.  You have to download an system update before you can use.  I don't know how long it took to download.

Unfortunately the channel doesn't have the weather for my town.  The nearest town it has weather for is 100 km away and it's weather is nothing like here.  I don't expect the Wii to have weather for every town, but it only has weather for about 15 towns in my entire state.  That's a pretty low number in my opinion.  Hopefully more will come.

That aside, the Weather Forecast channel is pretty sweet.  It shows the usual info for your town in a well presented layout.  But the fun comes when you switch to the globe to check the weather of somewhere else.  If you've used Google Earth you'll feel at home.  You can grab the globe and rotate or twist it, zoom in and change your elevation.  The Wii-mote is perfect suited for this application.  As you zoom in you'll see more towns.  Each town is represented with either a weather icon for the current weather or the temperature beside its name.   Clicking on a town gives you all forecast information for it.

I don't know how much I will use the Weather Forecast channel – not much whilst my town isn't there I suppose.  It will fun to be able to quickly check what the weather is like for my brothers, some of whom live on the other side of the country.  I hope the functions can be extended to provide satellite images mapped onto the globe, like with Google Earth.  It would also be nice if it mapped radar images of your region onto the globe so you could see where the clouds and rain is.  But these features might be asking too much.