The Introduction of Open Data at MeteoSwiss: Development, Set up, and Lessons Learned

The Swiss government introduced an Open Government Data (OGD) policy for all its federal offices starting on January 1^st, 2024, with a deadline for implementation at the end of 2026. For MeteoSwiss, the OGD policy took effect with the revised Ordinance for Meteorology and Climatology, entering into force on April 1^st, 2025. Building on the experience of several European countries, MeteoSwiss started the project for implementation already in 2022, before the governing law was finalized. The objective was to have API interfaces in place at the start of the revised ordinance, in order to prevent overloading of the current push delivery system for meteorological and climatological data.

The project was divided into the sub-projects ‘Legal’, ‘Data Policy’, ‘Technical Implementation, and ‘Organization and Customer Orientation’. It involved the management, customer support and data production units from the beginning in order to draw from the full know-how of the organization as well as to create awareness of the broad effects of OGD on the service. MeteoSwiss teamed up with the Federal Office of Topography swisstopo and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS for the hosting and data distribution. Furthermore, the experience of many European met services and the work of the RODEO project were an invaluable help.

This presentation will focus on the course of action regarding the interface design for different user groups of data literacy, the layout of the documentation, the strategy for sequencing the implementation steps as well as the design of the support organization. It will present the lessons learned during the project and the first months of operation, and the challenges of setting up a mixed infrastructure including a public cloud, having only vague assumptions of usage and a limited budget at hand. Finally, it will highlight the benefits of cooperating with partners and the community to design and speed up the introduction of open data.