OpenMeteo, one tool to rule them all

Meteo-France, the governmental French meteorological agency, produces, on a daily basis, numerical weather prediction data, using both global and local area models, radar images and data, satellite data, observations as well as climatological data. In France, as well as in Europe, there is very strong movement toward open-data. Until very recently, Meteo-France was selling data that is now available free of charge. For example, Meteo-France is now giving access to products from two of its numerical weather prediction models. This is just the beginning and in the coming months and years, Météo-France will give access to a very wide range of data, at no cost. In addition, the INSPIRE Directive (http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/) a pan-european legislation imposes to public organisations from the geospatial domain to give access to its data using Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards such as WMS (Web Map Services) or WCS ( Web Coverage Services). Furthermore, the meteorological community , within the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) framework, has developed the WMO Information System (WIS), which also aims at facilitating exchange and access of meteorological products. Finally, Meteo-France's commercial branch is proposing new value added services, such as dedicated application for smartphones. As a consequence, the same data has to be proposed on many different platforms (website, smartphone applications, WMS, WCS, direct download,...) that are rather similar but nevertheless have some specific requirements (different protocols, different formats...). The OpenMeteo project aims at developing the required IT environment to enable all these various usages while limiting, at the same time, the cost of development and maintenance of the IT solution. In order to do so, OpenMeteo is using the OpenWIS software and other opensource tools such as WSO2 Carbon. OpenWIS (www.openwis.io) has been developed by a consortium of countries and organisations (Australia, Finland, France, South-Korea, United-Kingdom, USA) primarily for the WMO Information System (WIS). The software is now opensource and is being used by more than 15 countries and organisations for their WIS services. Using its very advanced authentication and authorisation mechanism and metadata management tools, OpenMeteo is extending the use of the software is this IT urbanisation project. The paper will present the technical environment of the project, the expected benefits for Meteo-France and the challenges to propose such a wide range of data and products.