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 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.

View Service (WMS) for Synoptic observations

View Service (WMS) for Automatic weather station (AWS) observations

Bird density profiles are derived from weather radar volume data in real time, by the vol2bird algorithm as described in Dokter et al. (2011, 2019). The vol2bird algorithm exploits the radar reflectivity characteristics of different scatterers in the atmosphere, in order to distinguish biological from non-biological radar echoes. Once biological scatterers are isolated in the volume files, the reflectivity of these scatterers is converted in an estimate of the bird density per vertical layer of 200m, using a mean cross section of 11 cm2. The vbird profiles are provided for the following radars, with the radar owner in parentheses: Jabbeke (RMI), Wideumont (RMI), Helchteren (VMM), Zaventem (Skeyes), Herwijnen (KNMI), Den Helder (KNMI), Neuheilenbach (DWD), Essen (DWD), Abbeville (Météo-France) and Avesnois (Météo-France). References: - Dokter A.M., Liechti F., Stark H., Delobbe L., Tabary P., Holleman I., Bird migration flight altitudes studied by a network of operational weather radars, J. R. Soc. Interface, 8, 30–43, 2011, DOI 10.1098/rsif.2010.0116 - Dokter A.M., Desmet P., Spaaks J.H., van Hoey S., Veen L., Verlinden L., Nilsson C., Haase G., Leijnse H., Farnsworth A., Bouten W., Shamoun-Baranes J., bioRad: biological analysis and visualization of weather radar data, Ecography, 42, 852-860, 2019, DOI 10.1111/ecog.04028

Download Service (WFS) for Networks of automatic lidar-ceilometer systems The data are updated each 10 minutes. Only the archives of the last 30 days are available.

Hourly forecasts for each belgian commune, from current hour up to the next 5 days. This product is not publically available.

A climate normal is an average over a 30-years period. The period 1981-2010 is the current reference period recommended by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Recent climate normals are available for any locations in Belgium and several parameters including air temperature, precipitations and solar radiation. Climate normals for the reference period 1981-2010 are available for air temperature, precipitation and derived parameters (e.g., annual number of summer days, annual number of precipitation days, etc.). For solar radiation, the reference period had to be adjusted to 1984-2013 because of data availability. These climate normals are available as maps and as table for each Belgian municipality.

Download Service (WFS) for Synoptic observations