The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is a partner of the EU funded GEOWOW project (GEOSS Interoperability for Weather, Ocean and Water) which will propose and validate a multi-disciplinary, distributed architectural model federating Earth Observation and other Earth Science data holdings and put this model forward as the European contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Common Infrastructure.

The GEO Capacity Building Strategy focuses on three elements: human, institutional and infrastructure. The Weather component of the GEOWOW project will address all three by improving the access to THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE) data and developing and demonstrating products using this data in collaboration with users in developing countries, including providing education and training.

While the TIGGE archive has the essential capability to serve global fields of forecast data to users, enhanced functionality will be implemented to cater for a wider user base, for example, the ability to efficiently access long time series of forecast data at user-specified locations and the provision of data in alternative formats, such as NETCDF, generally used by climate scientists. Because at present only full global fields are available, the TIGGE archive is of very limited use to users with restricted Internet bandwidth. These developments will open access to the archive to a much larger range of users.