Although some of the sunniest faces in town try to bring prime-time TV news broadcasts to a cheerful close, their presentations are casting a pall over Hong Kong. Not only do some appear to know little about meteorology, but they are given so little on-air time that viewers are often left out in the cold.
Even the weathercasters themselves acknowledge the problem. ATV World weather presenter Justine Obrart says: 'When I first got to Hong Kong, I saw the standard of the weather presenters and I thought they were atrocious. I wondered how it could be so bad.' Obrart moved to Hong Kong last December after graduating from an English university with a degree in politics and French. She landed a job as a production assistant at Focal Point Productions and later applied for a part-time weather job at ATV 'for the experience'. After two weeks' training, she was put on air - live.
'It's good for your confidence,' she says. 'It's good to have a view from behind the camera and in front of the camera, so I get the whole perspective.' Perhaps she also wanted to show how the job could be done.
Neither Obrart nor her counterpart on TVB Pearl, Wincy Miao Wing-sze, had meteorological training before becoming weather presenters. Both nevertheless appear to take their jobs seriously. Miao is in fact so keen to live up to her namesake Wincy Willis ('who was a weathergirl a long, long time ago in England') that she watches videos of weather reports that friends abroad tape for her. And sometimes, when Hong Kong is hit by severe weather, she tries to give viewers more detailed explanations, but is usually thwarted because 'they'll call me up and say we don't have the time'.
While Obrart plans to produce TV documentaries one day, Miao says she joined TVB in the hope that she would get the opportunity to pursue animation.
Despite their efforts to improve the standard of weather presenting, however, commercial TV stations favour a style and format that seem antiquated.