I heard that Germany is going to make its wx model public access, which would be a first for Europe.
It is public already, called “GDS” (global data set). The federal parliament passed a bill requiring the state owned met service to provide certain products free of charge. It is provided via an FTP server (super fast, probably until people discover it) for which you have to request a user ID. There is a lot of stuff. They provide everything in English.
achimha wrote:
There is a lot of stuff.
I briefly looked list of info/services provided. How valuable this data is for enroute forecasts/actuals?
Do you know how it’s related to info that ADL collects from DWD and sends to ADL app?
None of DWD’s aviation specific products are included but those are mostly rendered from the same base data. We’re currently investigating the completeness of the ICON GRIB2 numerical weather model as an alternative to GFS. It should be much better as it has a higher resolution for Europe but it seems like not all required parameters are part of the public version.
The RADAR stuff is included with updates every 5 minutes but only for the German stations (i.e. a bit of coverage around Germany but not much). Meteosat is also in there.
We’re definitely going to use some of the stuff for autorouter but first have to get a better understanding. The terms of use are great, redistribution, processing etc. all allowed, the only thing they ask for is some sort of attribution. My favorite clause is this:
If a service provided by the DWD is used in a way that does not comply with its intended purpose,
the enclosed source references have to be deleted. This shall especially apply to weather warnings
for which there is no guarantee that they are delivered to all users at all times completely and without
delay.
