![Wetterpark-Offenbach-01](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Wetterpark-Offenbach-01.jpg)
The () or DWD for short, is the German Meteorological Service, based in
Offenbach am Main
Offenbach am Main () is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Hesse, Germany, on the left bank of the river Main (river), Main. It borders Frankfurt and is part of the Frankfurt urban area and the larger Frankfurt Rhein-Main Regional Aut ...
, Germany, which monitors
weather
Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the ...
and
meteorological conditions over
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
and provides weather services for the general public and for nautical, aviational, hydrometeorological or agricultural purposes. It is attached to the
Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport
The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (german: Bundesministerium für Digitales und Verkehr, ), abbreviated BMDV, is a cabinet-level ministry of the Federal Republic of Germany. Its main office is located in Berlin, while the majority ...
. The DWDs principal tasks include warning against weather-related dangers and monitoring and rating climate changes affecting Germany. The organisation runs
atmospheric models
An atmospheric model is a mathematical model constructed around the full set of primitive dynamical equations which govern atmospheric motions. It can supplement these equations with parameterizations for turbulent diffusion, radiation, moist p ...
on their
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
for precise
weather forecasting
Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology forecasting, to predict the conditions of the Earth's atmosphere, atmosphere for a given location and time. People have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia a ...
. The DWD also manages the national climate archive and one of the largest specialised libraries on weather and
climate
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in an area, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorologic ...
worldwide.
History
The DWD was formed in 1952 when the weather services of the western occupation zones were merged. In 1954, the
Federal Republic of Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...
joined the
World Meteorological Organization
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics.
The WMO originated from the Internati ...
(WMO). In 1990, following the
reunification
A political union is a type of political entity which is composed of, or created from, smaller polities, or the process which achieves this. These smaller polities are usually called federated states and federal territories in a federal governm ...
, the weather services of the
German Democratic Republic
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
were incorporated in the DWD.
Since the 1990s, the DWD has continuously reduced the number of staffed weather stations, which entailed substantial staff cutbacks. The DWD does not expect a reduction in forecast quality, given techniques like weather radar or satellites, which have significantly improved weather data collection.
Numerical weather prediction
The German Meteorological Service runs a global hydrostatic model of its own,
the GME (superseded by ICON in 2015), using a
hexagon
In geometry, a hexagon (from Ancient Greek, Greek , , meaning "six", and , , meaning "corner, angle") is a six-sided polygon. The total of the internal angles of any simple polygon, simple (non-self-intersecting) hexagon is 720°.
Regular hexa ...
al
icosahedral
In geometry, an icosahedron ( or ) is a polyhedron with 20 faces. The name comes and . The plural can be either "icosahedra" () or "icosahedrons".
There are infinitely many non- similar shapes of icosahedra, some of them being more symmetrica ...
grid since 2002. They developed the High Resolution Regional Model (HRM) in 1999, which is widely run within the operational and research meteorological communities and run with hydrostatic assumptions. The German non-hydrostatic Lokal-Modell for Europe (LME) has been run since 2002, and an increase in areal domain became operational on 28 September 2005. Since March 2009, the DWD operates a
NEC SX-9
The SX-9 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation. The SX-9 Series implements an SMP system in a compact node module and uses an enhanced version of the single chip vector processor that was introduced with the SX-6. The NEC SX-9 ...
with a peak performance of 109
teraFLOPS to help in the weather forecasting process.
The DWD also operates two other NWP services, COSMO-EU (Europe region) and COSMO-DE (Germany and surrounding region), with higher resolution than the ICON. The COSMO algorithm is maintained by the COSMO consortium, a cooperation of many European countries. It uses ICON data as input in DWD's setup.
Public services
Since 2005, the DWD has been publishing regional warnings against heat with the aim to reduce heat related fatalities. This decision was made because of the hot summer in 2003, when estimated 7000 people died from direct or indirect effects of the heat. Additionally, it sends out sea weather reports as
radioteletype
Radioteletype (RTTY) is a telecommunications system consisting originally of two or more electromechanical teleprinters in different locations connected by radio rather than a wired link. Radioteletype evolved from earlier landline teleprinter o ...
and faxes. Since 2006, the pollen warnings can be subscribed to for free on the DWD web site. Within its duty of primary meteorological information, the DWD offers a free daily weather report for Germany, which can be subscribed to by email on their official website. DWD offers free access to its climate data.
Structure
The is attached to th
Federal Ministry for Digital and Transportand thus closely linked to the German federal, regional and local
governments
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
, to the business community, and to the industrial world in terms of cooperation and consulting. Its work is based on the German Meteorological Office Act ('). , the DWD has roughly 2360 staff.
[ Besides the DWD central in Offenbach, there are regional centres in ]Hamburg
(male), (female) en, Hamburger(s),
Hamburgian(s)
, timezone1 = Central (CET)
, utc_offset1 = +1
, timezone1_DST = Central (CEST)
, utc_offset1_DST = +2
, postal ...
, Potsdam
Potsdam () is the capital and, with around 183,000 inhabitants, largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of B ...
, Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...
, Essen
Essen (; Latin: ''Assindia'') is the central and, after Dortmund, second-largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany. Its population of makes it the fourth-largest city of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, Düsseldorf and D ...
, Stuttgart
Stuttgart (; Swabian: ; ) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known as the ''Stuttgarter Kessel'' (Stuttgart Cauldron) and lies an hour from the ...
, Freiburg
Freiburg im Breisgau (; abbreviated as Freiburg i. Br. or Freiburg i. B.; Low Alemannic: ''Friburg im Brisgau''), commonly referred to as Freiburg, is an independent city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. With a population of about 230,000 (as o ...
and Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...
. Additionally, it runs Germany's densest network of meteorological measurement points with 183 full-time meteorological stations (60 of them staffed), as well as about 1784 extraordinal weather station
A weather station is a facility, either on land or sea, with instruments and equipment for measuring atmospheric conditions to provide information for weather forecasts and to study the weather and climate. The measurements taken include tempera ...
s run by volunteering amateurs (2014).
DWD hosts several international climate data centres, among them for example:
* Th
Global Precipitation Climatology Centre
* Th
Satellite Application Facility on Climate Monitoring
* Th
of the GCOS Surface Network (Global Climate Observing System
The Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) was established in 1992 as an outcome of the Second World Climate Conference, to ensure that the observations and information needed to address climate-related issues are obtained and made available to ...
)
References
See also
Related article
*NinJo
NinJo is a meteorological software system. It is a community project of the German Weather Service, the Meteorological Service of Canada, the Danish Meteorological Institute, MeteoSwiss, and the German Bundeswehr. It consists of modules for moni ...
workstation used by DWD
External links
*
DWD on Top500.org
{{Authority control
Governmental meteorological agencies in Europe
Offenbach am Main
1952 establishments in Germany