Since August 2019, users of the RMI smartphone app are able to send an observation of the meteorological conditions at a certain place and a certain time. The observations provide information about the weather conditions and potentially severe weather to the other users and to RMI. The collection of citizen weather reports is a valuable complement to the information obtained with the classical instruments like stations, radar and satellite. The data can be exploited for nowcasting, warnings and model verification, and eventually in assimilation. A general introduction of the data and their characteristics can be found in Reyniers et al. (2023). A basic quality control is implemented on the received observations via a plausibility check. This plausibility check determines whether an observation is plausible, suspicious or false, by comparing it to the INCA-BE nowcasting system using a simple thresholding scheme. INCA-BE is RMI's operational nowcasting system described in Reyniers et al. (2021). There is no strict spatial extent since there is no restriction at the input side: users can send observations from all over the globe. The bulk of the observations are received from within Belgium. Note that the plausibility check is not available for reports from outside Belgium.

The data set presents in the form of polygons the breakdown of Belgium in almost 20,000 statistical sectors. The statistical sector is the basic territorial unit resulting from the subdivision of the territory of municipalities by STATBEL since 1970 for the dissemination of its statistics at a finer level than the municipal level. A statistical sector cannot extend over two municipalities and any point in the municipal territory is part of one and the same statistical sector. The 1970 and 1981 versions are shown in analogue format while the 2001, 2011, 2018, 2019 etc. versions are available in digital vector format. The files can be linked to the data on population, housing and disposable income on the website of Statbel.

INSPIRE compliant download service (WFS) for geographic information of the core sample collection made available by the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS).

INSPIRE compliant download service (WFS) for geographic information of the Marine Spatial Plan made available by the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS).

INSPIRE compliant download service (WFS) for geographic information of the Marine Spatial Plan made available by the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS).

The SYNOP data of RMI contain the observations of the synoptic network, currently consisting of 29 stations, 13 of which are owned by RMI. The other stations belong to MeteoWing (8 stations), Skeyes (7 stations). There is also 1 foreign station. All SYNOP data is given in Universal Time! (local time winter = UT +1; local time summer = UT + 2) Parameters: 1. Precipitation: PRECIP_QUANTITY + PRECIP_RANGE 2. Temperature: TEMP + TEMP_MIN + TEMP_MAX + TEMP_GRASS_MIN 3. Wind: WIND_SPEED + WIND_SPEED_UNIT + WIND_DIRECTION + WIND_PEAK_SPEED 4. relative humidity: HUMIDITY_RELATIVE 5. weather type: WEATHER_CURRENT 6. air pressure: PRESSURE of PRESSURE_STATION_LEVEL 7. sunshine duration: SUN_DURATION_24H 8. Global radiation: SHORT_WAVE_FROM_SKY_24HOUR 9. Total cloudiness: CLOUDINESS

RMI operates a network of 17 automatic weather stations in Belgium. These weather stations report meteorological paramaters such as air pressure, temperature, relative humidity, precipitation (quantity, duration), wind (speed, gust, direction), sunshine duration, shortwave solar radiation and infrared radiation every 10 minutes. Daily AWS data are computed from the 10-min observations.

The ceilometer CL51 employs a pulsed diode laser LIDAR technology, where short, powerful laser pulses are sent out in a vertical or near-vertical direction. The reflection of light (backscatter) caused by clouds, precipitation or other obscuration is analysed and used to determine the cloud base height, the cloud layer height and the amount of clouds (in octas) in different layers.