Open Data policy at HungaroMet and its benefits for climate research

EU regulations declared Meteorological datasets as High-Value Datasets (HVD). To comply with this, as Hungary's national meteorological service provider, we publish our data on a public portal and make it freely available since January 1, 2021. On our website, odp.met.hu, model forecasts, weather radar data, current measurements and observations, and climate data are downloadable for everyone. The data usage has increased significantly with a growing number of visitors, reaching almost 58 000 in the past three years. The total data downloaded in 2023 reached 17 000 GB. CC-BY-SA licence applies to all our data. Furthermore, HungaroMet participates in the EU-funded RODEO project, so in the foreseeable future, our services will improve by API functionalities. So it is of utmost importance to raise awareness of our openly available data and services, as well as to follow uptake fo this data by our user community.

Our openly available climate database (HuClim) is a key component which is widely used by researchers for tracking climate change in Hungary. For instance, it is a key component of the Hungarian part of the FORESEE database (Open Database For ClimatE Change-Related Impact Studies in Central Europe, FORESEE-HUN v1.0) as the observation-based data (1971–2021).

HuClim provides researchers with an accurate, measurement-based and quality-controlled dataset. Our data is utilised in comprehensive research topics, including land, biodiversity and urban planning. These studies produce a plethora of articles related to climate change effects and adaptations in Hungary, which are published for the nonprofessional public to help them understand our future.  A few highlights from those include extreme wind storms related to a severe motorway accident, the increasing number of life-threatening, persistent heatwaves and the changing vegetation as a result of the drying climate in the country. Some of these applications and deducted results will be presented on the poster at the EMS conference.