Among its duties, MeteoSwiss is responsible for the operation and maintenance of a meteorological and climatological network guaranteeing regular measurements over the entire Swiss territory. Under the project SwissMetNet, MeteoSwiss is currently renewing and extending its ground-based network. With this project, MeteoSwiss will have a state-of-the art unified network, composed of 130 standard automatic weather stations, each of them measuring ca. 20 meteorological parameters and 20 housekeeping values.

In a first phase, the renewal of the existing automatic climatological and meteorological network will be completed by end of 2008 (70 stations). In a second phase (2009-2012), the complementary network (mainly alarm stations) and the conventional climatic network (with daily observations) will be upgraded and integrated into the SwissMetNet network (60 stations).

Moreover, in a standardization effort for data collection, transfer and dissemination, MeteoSwiss aims at integrating other measuring technologies in the SwissMetNet platform, in particular upper air remote sensing observation: a new network of wind profilers and passive micro-wave temperature profilers equipped over the Swiss Plateau is already connected to SwissMetNet, while novel technologies such as operational Raman lidar will soon be.