German Weather Service
Encyclopedia
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
as German Meteorological Service), residing in Offenbach am Main, Germany, is a scientific agency that monitors weather
Weather
Weather is the state of the atmosphere, to the degree that it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. Most weather phenomena occur in the troposphere, just below the stratosphere. Weather refers, generally, to day-to-day temperature and precipitation activity, whereas climate...
and meteorological
Meteorology
Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere. Studies in the field stretch back millennia, though significant progress in meteorology did not occur until the 18th century. The 19th century saw breakthroughs occur after observing networks developed across several countries...
conditions over Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and offers weather services for the general public as well as specific services for e.g. nautical, aviation
Aviation
Aviation is the design, development, production, operation, and use of aircraft, especially heavier-than-air aircraft. Aviation is derived from avis, the Latin word for bird.-History:...
al or agricultural
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
purposes. Organizationally, it lies within the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs (Germany)
Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs (Germany)
The Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development is a Ministry of Germany.It was created in 1998 by merger of the former Federal Ministry of Transport and the Federal Ministry of Regional Planning, Building and Urban Development, both established in 1949...
. The DWDs main task is to warn against weather related dangers, as well as monitoring and rating changes in the German climate
Climate
Climate encompasses the statistics of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological elemental measurements in a given region over long periods...
. The organization runs atmospheric models
Atmospheric models
Static atmospheric models describe how the ideal gas properties of an atmosphere change, primarily as a function of altitude....
on their own supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
to help in the task of weather forecasting
Weather forecasting
Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a given location. Human beings have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia, and formally since the nineteenth century...
. The DWD is also responsible for running the national clime archive and runs one of the biggest libraries worldwide that is specialized on weather and climate.
History
The DWD was founded in 1952 by joining the weather services of the western occupation zones. In 1954 the Federal Republic of Germany joined the World Meteorological OrganizationWorld Meteorological Organization
The World Meteorological Organization is an intergovernmental organization with a membership of 189 Member States and Territories. It originated from the International Meteorological Organization , which was founded in 1873...
(WMO). In 1975 the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by 19 European Member States and 15 Co-operating States...
(ECMWF) was founded for numerical weather prediction
Numerical weather prediction
Numerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in the 1950s that numerical weather predictions produced realistic...
up to ten days in advance. In 1990 the DWD integrated the weather services of the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
after reunification
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
.
Since the 1990s, the DWD continuously decreased the number of manned weather stations, which resulted in substantial staff cutbacks. According to the DWD, no reduction in forecast quality is to be expected, since techniques like weather radar or satellites have significantly improved weather data overall.
Numerical weather prediction
The German Weather Service has been running their global hydrostatic model, the GMEGME of Deutscher Wetterdienst
GME - operational global numerical weather prediction model of the German Weather Service. The model is on almost uniform icosahedral-hexagonal grid...
, using a hexagonal icosohedral 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 September 28, 2005. Since March 2009, the DWD operates a NEC SX-9
NEC SX-9
The SX-9 is a 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...
with a peak performance of 109 teraFLOPS
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
to help in the weather forecasting process.
Public Services
Since 2005, the DWD publishes 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 radioteletypeRadioteletype
Radioteletype is a telecommunications system consisting originally of two or more electromechanical teleprinters in different locations, later superseded by personal computers running software to emulate teleprinters, connected by radio rather than a wired link.The term radioteletype is used to...
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 e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
on their official home page.
Structure
The Deutsche Wetteramt belongs to the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs. This establishes a close link to the German governmentGovernment
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
, communes, economy, industry, country and state ministries for purposes of cooperation and consulting. Its work is based on the law about the DWD ("Gesetz über den Deutschen Wetterdienst"). Currently, the DWD consists of roughly 2600 occupants. Besides the DWD central in Offenbach, there are regional centers in Hamburg, Potsdam, Leipzig, Essen, Stuttgart and Munich. Additionally, it runs Germany's densest network of meteorological measurement points with 173 full time meteorological stations (100 of them manned), as well as about 2400 extraordinal weather station
Weather station
A weather station is a facility, either on land or sea, with instruments and equipment for observing atmospheric conditions to provide information for weather forecasts and to study the weather and climate. The measurements taken include temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, wind speed, wind...
s run by volunteering amateurs.