MSNBC was using a new weather technology today on its Hurricane Dennis coverage. It’s called ESP: Live and the product is so new there isn’t anything on it listed in the Products page of the Weather Central website. I did locate a PDF File that announced the product at NAB 2005.

ESP: Live features a radical new approach to storm and weather coverage tools. ESP: Live allows on-air talent to report on breaking weather while keeping the graphics and radar displays understandable for the viewers. In addition, the radar and storm track displays can now be interactively displayed with talent on-screen, improving the clarity of the presentation while providing full control of the presentation.

What this meant today was that Weather Central meteorologist Bill Boss was able to do some amazing things with the radar image. Here’s an example of what he called “a CAT scan of the storm”….

Boss was also able to isolate in 3D perspective the parts of the hurricane that are the strongest (represented in yellow orange colors).

NBC’s Weather Plus Network, which is now running in MSNBC’s Secaucus studios, is using Weather Central’s technology. So that is why it showed up on MSNBC today.

UPDATE: TVNewser has video of the the technology in action. (3.5 MB .WMV file)