NCM Saudi Arabia | A National Portal Migrated Without an Outage
The National Center for Meteorology is Saudi Arabia's national meteorological authority. Its public portal serves everyday citizens checking tomorrow's forecast alongside pilots reading aviation data, mariners reading marine forecasts and farmers reading agricultural data, all of whom rely on it to make operational decisions. Centric replaced the ageing portal entirely, rebuilt to Digital Government Authority design, accessibility and bilingual standards.
- The Challenge
A national portal cannot be launched the way a commercial site can. There is no soft launch and no acceptable window in which forecasts are unavailable to the public, so the cutover had to be invisible.
The audience problem ran alongside it. A citizen wants a clear forecast. A pilot needs aviation-grade METAR data. A mariner reads wind-barb charting. A farmer needs sector-specific agricultural forecasts. Millions of pilgrims moving through the Hajj route each year depend on conditions along that route. Building an interface that serves a citizen well usually means burying the operational data, and building for operators usually produces an interface a citizen cannot use. Everything also had to work identically in Arabic and English and meet government accessibility standards rather than approximate them.
The audience problem ran alongside it. A citizen wants a clear forecast. A pilot needs aviation-grade METAR data. A mariner reads wind-barb charting. A farmer needs sector-specific agricultural forecasts. Millions of pilgrims moving through the Hajj route each year depend on conditions along that route. Building an interface that serves a citizen well usually means burying the operational data, and building for operators usually produces an interface a citizen cannot use. Everything also had to work identically in Arabic and English and meet government accessibility standards rather than approximate them.
The Approach
A Dedicated Delivery Pod and a Formal Readiness Programme
Centric assembled a multi-disciplinary pod covering development, QA and project management, and built each stakeholder's requirement into a distinct part of the platform.
Sector-Specific Data Presentation
A multi-layer weather map carries radar, satellite and wind-barb layers over live automated weather station data. Dedicated METAR data serves aviation, with separate marine and agriculture pages, a Climate Explorer for the Kingdom's historical data and a Satellite Explorer for imagery. A dedicated Mashaer Weather module and Hajj Reports section serve the pilgrimage route. A hybrid forecast model blends the authority's own Central Forecasting Office judgment with Meteomatics computer models, labelled transparently on every page it appears so a reader always knows the source of a number.
Bilingual and Accessibility Compliance by Design
Arabic and English were built as equal implementations with full parity, audited page by page against Digital Government Authority visual and accessibility standards rather than treated as a translation layer. Current-location detection shows a visitor's local weather automatically, defaulting to Riyadh for anyone accessing from outside the Kingdom.
Go-Live Readiness and Legacy Continuity
The build ran through a formal readiness programme with dedicated tracks for infrastructure, performance and load testing, security testing, backup and disaster recovery, WCAG accessibility, functional testing and cross-device and browser testing, each closing before launch against a sixty-point checklist with a signed deployment sign-off held for the client. Every dependency the old site fed to outside systems was mapped, the legacy environment was renamed, and a reverse proxy bridge kept legacy-hosted images, PDFs and partner links resolving throughout the transition.
Centric assembled a multi-disciplinary pod covering development, QA and project management, and built each stakeholder's requirement into a distinct part of the platform.
Sector-Specific Data Presentation
A multi-layer weather map carries radar, satellite and wind-barb layers over live automated weather station data. Dedicated METAR data serves aviation, with separate marine and agriculture pages, a Climate Explorer for the Kingdom's historical data and a Satellite Explorer for imagery. A dedicated Mashaer Weather module and Hajj Reports section serve the pilgrimage route. A hybrid forecast model blends the authority's own Central Forecasting Office judgment with Meteomatics computer models, labelled transparently on every page it appears so a reader always knows the source of a number.
Bilingual and Accessibility Compliance by Design
Arabic and English were built as equal implementations with full parity, audited page by page against Digital Government Authority visual and accessibility standards rather than treated as a translation layer. Current-location detection shows a visitor's local weather automatically, defaulting to Riyadh for anyone accessing from outside the Kingdom.
Go-Live Readiness and Legacy Continuity
The build ran through a formal readiness programme with dedicated tracks for infrastructure, performance and load testing, security testing, backup and disaster recovery, WCAG accessibility, functional testing and cross-device and browser testing, each closing before launch against a sixty-point checklist with a signed deployment sign-off held for the client. Every dependency the old site fed to outside systems was mapped, the legacy environment was renamed, and a reverse proxy bridge kept legacy-hosted images, PDFs and partner links resolving throughout the transition.
The Outcome
A Migration the Public Never Noticed
The new portal went live on 21 June 2026, cut over from the legacy environment with no unplanned outage to any public-facing page and no broken dependency left behind.
123,773 Active Users in a Single Month
In August 2026, the second full month after launch, the platform recorded 228,790 sessions from 123,773 active users, 118,188 of them new, at 1.85 sessions per user.
78% of Sessions From Organic Search
Google organic delivered 179,660 sessions for a site that had replaced its entire URL structure eight weeks earlier. A migration of this size normally costs a government portal a quarter of its search visibility. A further 9,985 sessions came from X, the largest referring source outside search, and close to 2,900 arrived from AI assistants including 2,805 from ChatGPT.
Adopted as the National Reference
Within that month the site drew referral traffic from Saudi Aramco's internal network, the World Meteorological Organization, the Ministry of Environment Water and Agriculture, the GCC meteorological network, the Saudi Open Data platform, the national emergency number, the National Civil Emergency Centre, the Nuclear and Radiological Regulatory Commission, the Jeddah and Riyadh municipalities, and the United States Department of State travel advisory.
Scope Extended Since Launch
The client has since extended Centric's engagement to cover remaining legacy dependency removal, further styling refinements, a new Climate Statistics section and a CRM-routed enquiry form.
The new portal went live on 21 June 2026, cut over from the legacy environment with no unplanned outage to any public-facing page and no broken dependency left behind.
123,773 Active Users in a Single Month
In August 2026, the second full month after launch, the platform recorded 228,790 sessions from 123,773 active users, 118,188 of them new, at 1.85 sessions per user.
78% of Sessions From Organic Search
Google organic delivered 179,660 sessions for a site that had replaced its entire URL structure eight weeks earlier. A migration of this size normally costs a government portal a quarter of its search visibility. A further 9,985 sessions came from X, the largest referring source outside search, and close to 2,900 arrived from AI assistants including 2,805 from ChatGPT.
Adopted as the National Reference
Within that month the site drew referral traffic from Saudi Aramco's internal network, the World Meteorological Organization, the Ministry of Environment Water and Agriculture, the GCC meteorological network, the Saudi Open Data platform, the national emergency number, the National Civil Emergency Centre, the Nuclear and Radiological Regulatory Commission, the Jeddah and Riyadh municipalities, and the United States Department of State travel advisory.
Scope Extended Since Launch
The client has since extended Centric's engagement to cover remaining legacy dependency removal, further styling refinements, a new Climate Statistics section and a CRM-routed enquiry form.
Enterprise Platforms Delivered to Government Standard
Public-sector platforms are judged on continuity as much as capability.
Centric delivers enterprise and government builds through a formal readiness programme with documented sign-off, maps every external dependency before cutover, and treats bilingual and accessibility compliance as structural requirements rather than a final pass.
Centric delivers enterprise and government builds through a formal readiness programme with documented sign-off, maps every external dependency before cutover, and treats bilingual and accessibility compliance as structural requirements rather than a final pass.
123,773
Active Users In One Month
78%
Sessions From Organic Search
0
