The European Union is moving towards Open Data

Europe is moving forward slowly, but she moves forward… towards free access to data from public services ! On September 21 December 2022 was published in the Official Journal of the European Union, under the reference C/2022/9562, The " Regulations of the European Commission establishing a list of specific high-value datasets and the modalities of their publication and re-use".

Historical

After the publication by the European Commission in May 2010 of Digital Agenda for Europe, it was not until the 26 June 2019 to see published in the Official Journal of Europe  The " Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and the Council on 20 June 2019, on open data and the reuse of public sector information". It took three years and a few more months to write and publish the Regulations at the end 2022. It shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union, either the 10 January 2023. It is applicable 16 months after its entry into force. This Regulation shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States.

However, Member States may exempt certain public sector organizations, at their request and in accordance with the criteria set out in the Directive, the obligation to make high-value datasets available free of charge for a period not exceeding two years from the date of entry into force of this Implementing Regulation.

Content

The directive 2019/1024 aims to promote the use of standardised public licences available online for the re-use of public sector information. The main objective of establishing the list of High-value data is that the public data with the highest socio-economic potential are provision for reuse with a minimum of legal and technical restrictions and for free.

Annex I to the Directive (EU) 2019/1024 breaks down high-value datasets into six thematic categories :

1. Geospatial
2. Earth Observation and Environment
3. weather
4. statistics
5. Business and Business Ownership
6. mobility

Weather data

The specified data set includes numerical weather forecast data (NWF) that must meet two very specific criteria :

• Level of detail : At least 48 hours in advance in one-hour increments, national, up to 2,5 km/best mesh available
• Features : Deterministic and/or sets if available, for meteorological parameters and levels of interest

The provision must also comply with two specific criteria :

• Format : GRIB (or NetCDF)
• Frequency and update : Every six hours, or better temporal resolution, on the latest 24 hours steps.

We can therefore welcome the finalization of this initiative, which should, within a reasonable period of time, Lead to the free availability of the best high-resolution weather forecast models, particularly those of ECMWF (¹).

Fortunately, some national weather prediction services did not wait for these texts to offer GRIB files to the public ! This is the case of Météo-France which has made its ARPEGE and AROME models available free of charge (²) in 2015, or German Weather Service which made available at the end of 2018 Its different ICON high resolution models. And even more recently, in March 2022, on April ECMWF has released a low-resolution version (0,4°) of its IFS set model, which is already a start.

Despite a very long gestation (³), these European texts are in the direction of a gradual increase in the means enabling, among others, significantly improve the safety of our navigation, in an increasingly complex and versatile weather context. We can only rejoice.

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(¹) ECMWF weather data soon open to public [2rd part]
(²) Météo-France GRIB files finally for free
(³) Plea for free European data
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