The () or DWD for short, is the German Meteorological Service, based in Offenbach am Main, 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 betwee ...

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 DWDs principal tasks include warning against weather-related dangers and monitoring and rating climate changes affecting Germany. The organisation runs atmospheric models 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 instructio ...

for precise

weather forecasting Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the conditions of the atmosphere for a given location and time. People have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia and formally since the 19th cen ...

. 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 meteorologi ...

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 Inter ...

(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 governmen ...

, 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 **G ...

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 Greek , , meaning "six", and , , meaning "corner, angle") is a six-sided polygon. The total of the internal angles of any simple (non-self-intersecting) hexagon is 720°. Regular hexagon A '' regular hexagon'' has ...

al icosahedral 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 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 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 Transport
and thus closely linked to the German federal, regional and local governments, 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 Hamburg (, ; nds, label=Hamburg German, Low Saxon, Hamborg ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (german: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg; nds, label=Low Saxon, Friee un Hansestadt Hamborg),. is the List of cities in Germany by popul ...

, Potsdam,

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 ...

, Essen,

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 Sw ...

, Freiburg and

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and ...

. 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 stations 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)

History

Numerical weather prediction

Public services

Structure

References

See also

Related article

External links