Open data for weather observations in Europe – a status review

Weather observations are a key component in the value chain to create societal benefits in meteorology. They are not just essential input to numerical weather prediction models but also core to many other applications ranging from risk assessment for insurance applications, drought monitoring in agriculture, and integration of renewable energy into the power grids.

In order to maximize the return on public investment into measurement network infrastructure and operation of weather stations, a wide use of the generated data is essential. This has been confirmed just recently by an evaluation of the European Commission on high-value datasets.

While in recent years, operators of various national and regional grids have increasingly made their measurement data publicly available, there was no transparent monitoring in place about the evolution of open data from weather stations and the availability and distribution of data for specific parameters.

In order to assess the status of open and freely available weather observations in Europe, we have captured all freely available weather observations as made available on the opendata.dwd.de server of Deutscher Wetterdienst. These observations have been decoded and stored in a database system. We compared the availability of data from weather stations to the overall station list in the ECOMET catalogue.

We will present which countries provide comprehensive sets of their weather observations as open data and also evaluate the temporal frequency of the available measurements. We have also investigated if there has been an evolution of open data from January 2020 until recently.

Furthermore, we will show insights into availability of specific parameters, in particular hourly measurements of the amount of precipitation, wind gusts and global radiation and how this impacts the value creation in downstream services.