EUMETNET

Collaboration between national weather services can significantly boost efficiency and effectiveness of global and regional observing networks and enable the development of complex methods for weather and climate prediction possible. Hereby transfer and exchange of knowledge, experience, and technology is as important as well coordinated collaboration. Furthermore, the common infrastructure will be consolidated and expanded. In this way the national weather services are in position to fulfill their statutory tasks more efficiently, in a less costly way, and with higher quality.

Following this principle, the Informal Conference of the European Meteorological Services was founded in 1995 and given a legal entity in the form of an Economic Interest Group in 2009. Switzerland is part of the founding members of the thus created European Meteorological Network (EUMETNET). Their headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium with presently 29 national weather services as participating members.

In EUMETNET the national weather services collaborate in joint programs, where the chief part of the coordination effort is invested in the area of meteorological observations. Examples of this collaboration include the harmonization and exchange of weather radar data, automated weather reports from commercial aircraft and the transboundary dissemination of weather warnings. For this latter, an extremely important aspect of weather prediction, the warning platform meteoalarm has been developed in the program EMMA (European Multi-services Meteorological Awareness). This platform allows an overview on high-impact weather situations throughout Europe at a glance. In the area of climatology, EUMETNET aims at a sustainable pan-European data infrastructure aiming at a simplified access to and dissemination of climate information, as well as common quality standard and harmonization methods.