METGATE: the European Meteorological information portal for aviation

In the past, the meteorological service for aviation users in Europe was organized at the level of each country: the National Met Service provided information to the Air Navigation Service Provider in charge of controlling the national air space, with little cooperation between neighboring countries. Reducing the fragmentation of this organization is often seen as a way to reduce it's cost and to enhance the global quality of the service. With this in mind the European Commission has decided to set up the Single European Sky (SES) initiative. As part of the SESAR European program (Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research program), major European meteorological service providers (mainly UK MetOffice, DWD – Germany, and Meteo-France) have developed a prototype for a unique access point to all meteorological information from Europe, the METGATE. This project was structured in two development activities. The first one aimed at demonstrating the possibility to build collaboratively homogeneous consolidated products that can benefit from the local expertise of all the Met Services while avoiding inconsistencies or discrepancies along political borders. The second activity aimed at developing a prototype for a unique access point to all Met information relevant for the aviation community, fitting their needs in terms of data formats and services. This development implied interactions with other SESAR projects in charge of the definition of the data and service models, to provide a standardized view of Met information to the aviation community. A Service oriented approach was chosen to build the future system using emerging standards such as OGC WebServices (WFS, MetOcean profile for WCS, and WPS). The result of this activity is a working prototype which was used to support validation exercise with near real-time consolidated Met information over Europe, and other demonstrations. In the future the METGATE prototype will be used to provide MET information to more ATM application, and in wider cooperation with similar systems outside Europe, to refine the requirements for the operational system due in the next decade.