Open-Data and the Citizens: gathering weather and climate data in a digital common, crowdsourcing from the community, and producing value-added tools for the ecosystem

Infoclimat is a non-profit organization created 20 years ago, aiming at facilitating the use, production and dissemination of weather and climate data, to experts and to the citizens, while promoting scientific education towards the general public and children.

The organization, constitued of hundreds of volunteers and no employees at this time, has started its work by gathering sources of open weather data at the beginning of this century. From a few French weather stations under WMO Resolution 40, to more than 18.000 weather stations around the world today, and 6 billion climate records accessible. Today, there are more than 40 sources of data that are processed, from the GTS SYNOP records to national open-data APIs made accessible by NWS all over the world, to custom IoT data transmission for owned weather stations. Often, those records do not use the same standards, data granularity, or time granularity, which make merging them the trickiest part of the platform.

The citizens are also part of this development : more than 1800 of their weather stations, strictly quality-controlled, complement the official networks, maintained by the organization or its contributors in France, or its non-profit counterparts in other European countries. The data produced by the organization network is placed under open licenses, and its access is made possible through a standardized API. The metadata, available to all consumers of the data, is followed closely by a team of enthusiasts and algorithms, which monitors data quality, instruments calibration, and environmental changes. This way, high-quality data is obtained, in environments that are agreed with the national weather service Météo-France.

The platform maintained by the volunteers of Infoclimat provides access to data in a common form, whatever its source, with respect to the producers licenses. There are many uses of the data stored in the platform : climatological analyses, real-time or climate interactive maps, national indicators, and data fusion with gridded products (eg. reanalysis, Copernicus products,...). The tools are made to be accessible to the general public for educational purposes, on computers or smartphones, but they are design so that more professionnal users can dig out the data, analyze them further or download raw data.

Finally, the organization is now changing its scale : from 100% volunteers, to now a first developer, from a budget of 30.000€ in 2015 to 100.000€ in 2022. The platform is shifting towards better internationalization, to make those tools available in more languages, and aims at integrating more regionalized climate predictions (like CORDEX), for better user awareness on climate change. Also, there is a work in progress to make the platform available for scientific teams to store and analyze their data reliably and in a persistent way, for example for researchers on Urban Heat Islands.