The Norwegian Meteorological Institute

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) is the national public meteorological service in Norway.  The institute provides information to public authorities, businesses and the general public to secure life and property and in support of economic activity, societal planning, and environmental protection. This includes operational monitoring and forecasting for large North Atlantic and Arctic areas. MET Norway represents Norway in international meteorological organizations such as ECMWF, EUMETSAT, EUMETNET, WMO, and other international forums. MET Norway also participates in national and international research projects funded by EU and other bodies on climate, atmospheric and marine research including the application of remote sensing techniques and air pollution research. MET Norway employs about 400 persons, in addition to about 600 observers, including staff at Arctic stations.

The infrastructure of the MET Norway:
MET Norway operates an extensive operational meteorological observation network that covers parts of the Arctic, including manned stations on the islands Jan Mayen, Bjørnøya and Hopen, as well as a network on the Svalbard archipelago. MET Norway has access to national supercomputer facilities for doing research and running predictive models, and also cooperates with the Swedish national meteorological service on running joint operational models on Swedish supercomputer resources.

MET Norway supports and implements a free and open data policy. Official data and products from the institute are regarded as public-sector information and are freely available to the public for use, distribution, and processing. Channels for public distribution of weather forecasts include the website and the mobile application yr.no (with 5-10 million unique user’s weekly – the largest weather website in the world outside the US) as well as various lower level download services.

MET Norway is connected to WMO data exchange, both through WMO Information System and through the Global Telecommunication System. Data management is based on a metadata driven approach where datasets are documented including the interfaces for accessing them. In addition to close linkages to national High-Performance Computing and Storage systems, MET Norway has also local HPC and HPS systems that scales for future needs.