Current technology developments at Finnish Meteorological Institute

During recent years, several large-scale technological changes and modernization projects have been initiated within FMI and in collaboration with other parties. At the same time advances in technology like cloud computing, containerized software development and AI assistants have emerged. These challenges combined have made for a busy but rewarding couple of years.

Drawing from initiatives like the European Union Open Data Directive and the WMO WIS2 FMI has formed a consortium which received EU funding to build new technology to foster data sharing across Europe. The RODEO project, a collaboration of 11 meteorological services in Europe as well as ECMWF and EUMETNET, started in 2023 aims to build a one-stop shop for open European meteorological data. The solution will be fully compliant with the WMO WIS2 specification and in a sense be the “WIS2 in Europe”, also known as FEMDI (Federated European Meteorological Data Infrastructure). RODEO will however additionally include more frequent surface observations, provide a single API gateway to access data from all EUMETNET countries and host a visualization tool for viewing the data. Data will be provided between member states and to the public, although some data may be of restricted use. Technically the API will be OGC API EDR. Several implementations of EDR including FMI’s own have already been developed, at least in the Nordic countries.

FMI’s main forecaster tool, SmartMet Workstation, has been around for over two decades now and it still is without a match with its visulization capabilities. However, being based on an architecture that demands local data, it is becoming increasingly difficult to cope with growing numerical weather model sizes. Luckily, the successor Geoweb is on good track to become the next number one forecasting tool. Geoweb works in the browser and utilizes standard OGC interfaces (currently WMS and API EDR) for data retrieval and does not require local data. This gives flexibility for the backends to run close to the data. This software co-operation originally started by KNMI is now a joint initiative as FMI and Met Norway joined the development. Geoweb will feature weather warning and aviation domain functionality as well such as TAF and SIGMET production.

In the aviation domain the SWIM program is moving steadily towards modernizing traditional TAC style formats for products like TAF, METAR SIGMET and so forth. Also how data is retrieved and distributed is shifting from peer-to-peer systems to using APIs. In this case the aim is also to heavily use OGC API EDR. This development, however, may only be a temporary solution as the demand for modern information-rich end user products is rising at the same time. FMI co-operates with the Nordic and Baltic countries via the NAMCON (Northern Europe Aviation Meteorology Consortium) program. At the same time development is starting to build new generation Meteorological Aerodrome Forecast service building on the ideas on our highly successful Airport Forecast product for Helsinki airport.

In addition to utilizing AI assistants in software development AI and machine learning methods are used for postprocessing weather model data in many different use cases such as calibrating the ECMWF and MEPS models with various methods. We are also running and benchmarking the Pangu weather AI model by Huawei.