Weather Star 4000 - Standard Features

Standard Features

A Weather Star 4000 came with these features:

• Graphical weather products, such as icons and maps for regional products.
• An internal local radar product (the first on any STAR), in both time-lapse and static variants. (The time-lapse radar was added in a major late 1992 update. The previous Weather Stars had the capability to display radar, but had to be connected to a third-party source.)
• The ability to receive text-based local forecasts created by TWC meteorologists (and before that the National Weather Service).
• A lower display line (LDL), with forecast information in the top 50 US markets. While the IntelliStar LDL is cued to air all the time, the 4000, Junior, and XL LDLs are not cued to air anymore except with a cuing messup.
• The ability to crawl or scroll weather warnings from the National Weather Service.
• Specialty products for certain areas: the Air Quality Forecast for southern California (which would make its national debut on the IntelliStar), Tides for coastal areas, and the Marine Forecast.

Also, until the mid-1990s, The Weather Channel sold an optional sensor package that could be connected to a Weather Star to display weather conditions at the headend office on the LDL, including the current temperature, the highest and lowest temperatures recorded since midnight, relative humidity, wind speed, direction, and gusts, and current daily and monthly precipitation totals.

Radar products are/were not available on the Weather Star 4000 outside of the contiguous 48 states and Puerto Rico.

• In Alaska and (in one case) in New York City, the Latest Observations product was repeated.
• In Hawaii, the radar was centered in the state of Washington with a label permanently displaying "Radar Data Temporarily Unavailable".