The RODEO Project - Making European Meteorological Data Open and Accessible

The RODEO Project – Making European Meteorological Data Openly Available

The European Union, (EU), funded RODEO project will deliver at the end of 2025. It is a joint effort by 11 European meteorological institutions, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the network of 33 European National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, EUMETNET.

The project is strengthening the capacity of the European meteorological data providers by:

• Developing a single user interface and a data catalogue for making all the data discoverable;
• Developing APIs, using open licences, for accessing weather observation data, climate data, weather radar data, warnings, and AI datasets.
• Supporting the deployment of national data portals and APIs.
• Maintaining a comprehensive user engagement strategy (involving a Project External Advisory Board, composed of public and private sector parties) and giving frequent communications updates through several channels.

The RODEO project is funded through the EU Digital Europe Programme (DEP) as a response to the EU Directive on Open Data and the Reuse of Public-sector Information (EU directive 2019/1024) and its Implementing Regulation on High Value Datasets (HVD). The Regulation defines meteorological HVDs as observation data, climate data, warnings, weather radar data and Numerical Weather Prediction model data (NWP). The regulation states these HVDs shall be shared free of charge, under the conditions of the Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence or a less restrictive open licence. They will be openly accessible via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), machine-readable and bulk downloadable.

The RODEO project is helping EU based National meteorological Organisations to meet these requirements through different work packages, each focusing on delivering one of the HVDs, engaging with users or developing on overarching data infrastructure. By AMS2025, it should be possible to show some early demonstrations of these HVDs.

As a result, this project will facilitate a vast increase in the availability of European-wide real-time meteorological data available free and open for the public, business, and other governmental institutions worldwide. This will open business opportunities for several sectors and application areas. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will benefit from the greater data availability by creating new digital products and services and eventually attract new investors.

These data will also support research, including AI based activities, and enable better-informed policymaking, especially in actions mitigating climate change. Overall, better data availability leads to better warnings, forecasts, and services to the public and weather-critical industries which contributes to the safe and efficient functioning of society with multiple benefits across the economy, industry, and society.

Aside from its contribution to the overall European Union and Digital Europe Programme (DEP) objectives, the RODEO project will also help EUMETNET Members contribute to objectives of the global meteorological community. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Unified Data Policy commits WMO Member Nations to support free and open exchange of meteorological data. The RODEO project builds upon the WMO and EUMETNET long-term plans for exchange of meteorological data under the WMO Information System 2.0 (WIS 2.0).