OpenMeteo: A Service-Centric Platform for Delivering Environmental Data

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. 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.

To go with this evolution, Meteo-France launched the OpenMeteo project, aiming at developing the required IT environment to enable the implementation of many new applications while limiting, at the same time, the cost of development and maintenance of the IT solution. As a result, this project federates many different tools, which allows to provide the same data to many different applications (website, smartphone application, download services …) using different formats and services.

The provision of freely available meteorological data has proved very successful, with hundreds of users trying to get the same data at the same time: the limited network capacity led to download times in hours.

As a consequence, there is a growing need to provide tools and well-defined API that afford a convenient mechanism to extract only the data needed for a given purpose without the need for meteorological domain specific knowledge, but also to provide a data access & data analytics platform that allows data consumers to execute their algorithms close to the data and generate user-relevant information, thereby avoiding the need to move large volumes of data.

This paper discusses the approaches being assessed or adopted by meteo france to achieve this goal, and how the OpenMeteo project provides the technical infrastructure for these new applications, the expected benefits for Meteo-France and the challenges to propose these new services