Deutscher Wetterdienst

The German Weather Service ( DWD ) with its headquarters in Offenbach am Main is the national meteorological service of the Federal Republic of Germany. It provides meteorological services ( weather forecast ) for the general public or individual users, such as shipping, agriculture or science, and also operates the Information Federal Administration ( IFMGA ).

Mission and structure

The main task of the DWD is to warn of weather-related hazards and to monitor the climate in Germany to document and evaluate its changes. The DWD operates at the same time the national climate archive of the Federal Republic of Germany and, with the German Meteorological Library one of the largest specialized libraries on the topics of weather and climate around the world.

The German Weather Service is a partial legal entity under public law within the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Transport and digital infrastructure ( BMVI ) (§ 1 para 1 DWDG ). Therefore, there is a constant contact with the federal government, federal and provincial ministries, municipalities, business and industry for consultation and cooperation. The legal basis for the DWD is the law of the German Weather Service ( DWD - law, DWDG ).

Locations

In addition to its headquarters in Offenbach am Main, there are six other regional headquarters in Hamburg, Potsdam, Leipzig, Essen, Stuttgart and Munich. In addition, the DWD operates the densest and largest meteorological monitoring network in Germany with 111 full-time automatic weather stations and 70 full-time staffed weather stations. The next official monitoring network of the DWD covers approximately 1850 stations that are served by volunteer weather observers. As part of the basic needs of the German Weather Service offers a free daily Germany Weather Report, which can be subscribed to by e -mail.

The DWD is a member of the Association of departmental research institutions.

History

The DWD was founded in 1952 by the merger of the meteorological services of the various Western Allied zones of occupation. In 1954 the accession of the Federal Republic of Germany to the World Meteorological Organization ( WMO). From 1955 to 1957, the headquarters of the Frankfurt street in Offenbach was built. The much acclaimed design by Paul Friedrich Posenenske characterized by a separation of exterior walls and load-bearing structure which has been emphasized by the shifted bands of windows.

Since 1960, the DWD itself is no longer active in the German television weather - for ARD took over the Hessischer Rundfunk this task. Meanwhile, make all German television stations in Germany their weather broadcasts either own weather editors or by external service providers. The DWD provides only the observation and forecast data that is used the work of the local meteorologists as a base.

In 1975, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather was founded Forecast in Reading to create predictions of up to ten days.

In 1990, the DWD integrated the Meteorological Service of the German Democratic Republic.

Since the 1990s the number of manned weather stations of the German Weather Service is continuously reduced, which necessarily involves a significant staff reduction, which is the DWD defined as a federal authority politically, the result has. According to the DWD deterioration is not to be feared, since modern remote sensing instruments such as weather radar and weather satellites attended with their dimensional measurement for a significant improvement in the observational data.

2006, the data processing and visualization system NinJo was introduced, which was created in the framework of international cooperation. On 15 July 2005, the weather park Offenbach was inaugurated.

Frankfurter Strasse - - In 2008, the new DWD headquarters on the same site was opened. The old building from the fifties had to give way, it would have to be completely rebuilt due to new safety regulations. In addition, the new building has created enough space for all employees, which until then had been housed in rented offices, as well as for the new mainframe of the DWD.

Since March 2009, the DWD operates a NEC SX -9 high performance computer with a peak performance of 109 TFLOPS to calculate forecasts.

Until the end of 2013 [ deprecated], the DWD its 16 stations of the radar composite of operational radar composite with quality assurance radars to dual - polarization radars to. Already in 2011, a 17 station in Niederrieden at Memmingen was put into operation.

Public services

The DWD released its weather warnings to the public on the Internet. These include, for example, Storm warnings, warnings of severe thunderstorms or snow warnings. Since 2005, the German Weather Service also publishes regional heat warnings. With the warning system, the number of death and disease is to be reduced in the heat. The reason for the development of the warning system was the hot summer of 2003, in which in Germany alone probably more than 7,000 people, among others, victims of the high temperatures were. He also sends sea-weather forecasts as a radio telex and fax. Long-and short -wave transmitter are located in Pinneberg.

Since 2006, the pollen warnings of the DWD for free on the website of the DWD are subscribed. The German Weather Service also issues the heavy rain catalog Kostra.