Introduction
A project called RODEO, the Provision of Open Access to Public Meteorological Data and Development of Shared Federated Data Infrastructure for the Development of Information Products and Services, is a joint effort by eleven European National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the network of 31 European National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (EUMETNET). The Project Partners are listed in the page Partners.
The RODEO project develops a user interface and Application Programming Interfaces (API) for accessing meteorological datasets declared as High Value Datasets (HVD) by the EU Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 under the EU Open Data Directive (EU) 2019/1024. The project also fosters the engagement between data providers and data users for enhancing the understanding of technical solutions being available for sharing and accessing the HVD datasets.
Surface weather observations, climate data, weather warnings, radar data and numerical weather prediction (NWP) data are defined as meteorological high valu datasets. The distribution of these datasets is going to be made available under an open licence, in machine-readable formats using APIs and bulk downloads following the FAIR principles (usability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability).
The project is funded by the EU Digital Europe Program (DIGITAL) and EUMETNET.
Project Aims & Goals
The project makes meteorological High Value Datasets easily available with an aim to bring new data to businesses, public administrations and citizens. It reinforces the European public meteorological data infrastructure and enhances the providers’ digital capacity to share data. Furthermore, the project also fosters the engagement between data providers and data users for enhancing the understanding of technical solutions to be available for sharing and accessing the datasets.
The project strengthens the capacity of the European meteorological data providers to comply with the HVD Implementing Regulation by:
- Developing a user interface
- Developing APIs for accessing weather observation data, climate data, weather radar data, warnings, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) datasets
- Developing a data catalogue for making data discoverable
- Engaging with the data owners and user communities
- Supporting the deployment of national data portals and APIs
- Making HVDs available from the project partners
Impact on users
The increased availability of data boosts entrepreneurship and potentially results in the creation of new companies. New open datasets are an important resource for small and medium-sized enterprises to develop new digital products and services. Reuse of data opens business opportunities for several sectors ultimately leads attracting more investors. By making data much easier to use, reseach, academia, AI applications and many other application areas can utilize the data more efficiently.
Overall, better data availability leads to better warnings, forecasts, and services to the public and weather-critical industries, and contributes to the safe and efficient functioning of society with multiple benefits across the European economy, industry, and society.