From April 2025, MeteoSwiss will offer free access to its data, an approach that is part of the Confederation’s Open Government Data strategy.
The Federal Council recently adopted the revision of the Ordinance on Meteorology and Climatology (OMét). From April 2025, MeteoSwiss will make its data accessible free of charge as part of the Confederation’s Open Government Data (OGD) strategy.
Enshrined in the Federal Act on the Use of Electronic Means for the Performance of Official Tasks (LMETA), which came into force last January, the Confederation’s OGD strategy provides that the data produced by federal offices in the exercise of their legal mandate should also be accessible to the public. The aim of this strategy is to promote transparency, participation and innovation in all areas of society by making management data public and freely accessible, states the authorities’ press release. The LMETA will be applied to MeteoSwiss data, thus eliminating the data-related costs that the federal office has been collecting until now.
Dedicated repositories on the Federal Geographic Data Infrastructure
The first data published by MeteoSwiss in open access will include, among other things, ground measurement data, atmospheric profiles, as well as weather forecasts. Contacted by the editorial staff, Christian Lukasczyk, Head of Sales and Support at MeteoSwiss, indicates that most of the data available to the federal office should be directly available on the announced date. This data, stored on an AWS infrastructure, will be able to be downloaded in the form of pre-processed files from dedicated repositories on the Federal Geographic Data Infrastructure (FGDI).
An API proposed later
The release date of the complete weather model dataset, which is particularly large in volume, is still uncertain at this stage. In addition, it is possible that some very specific data that is aimed at specialists will not be released initially, while the release of datasets that are used most frequently will be prioritised. At a later stage (probably in the course of 2026), it will also be possible to make individual requests via an API.
Several challenges
Among the main challenges surrounding this project, our interlocutor mentions the preparation of metadata, which is not currently unified and needs to be compatible with European standards and those of the World Meteorological Organization. “We would like to be included in the RODEO project, which will make meteorological data freely accessible on a European scale. But this implies certain obligations,” confides Christian Lukasczyk. In addition, the publication of this open data will certainly have an organizational impact on the MeteoSwiss teams. For example, it will be necessary to set up support for users as soon as the data is made available next April.
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