RADQPE provides high resolution radar-based quantitative precipitation estimation in realtime for Belgium and its surroundings. This product is not publically available yet.

The composite is produced every 5 minutes using the reflectivity data from the Wideumont and Jabbeke weather radars. This product is not publicly available yet.

The climatological network contains about 200 stations spread over the whole country. It consists of voluntary observers recruited by the RMI, professional observers of Skeyes (civil aviation) or the Air Force (military aviation) and civil servants of the state, communities or private companies. The observers measure the amount of rain fallen in the last 24 hours in the pluviometer of the RMI every morning at 8 o‘clock. In more than half of the stations the extreme air temperatures are also recorded by reading the maximum and minimum temperature in a standardized weather shelter. The observers send their observations either on a  daily or on a monthly basis to RMI. This product is not publicly available yet.

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

The data consists in tables of estimated extreme precipitation quantities for precipitation durations ranging from 10 minutes to 30 days and return periods ranging from 2 to 200 years for each Belgian municipality.

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. Hourly AWS data are computed from the 10-min observations.

Hail products are derived from the observed vertical profiles of radar reflectivity and the NWP vertical profiles of temperature. Three types of products are generated. poh : probability of hail of any size (larger than 0.5 cm diameter)expressed in %. posh : probability of severe hail(larger than 2cm)expressed in %. mesh : maximum expected size of hailexpressed in mm of hailstone diameter. All products are generated every 5 minutes. This product is not publically available yet.

Gridded observational data provides an estimate of the spatial distribution of a meteorological variable based on observations. While instrumental measurements are taken at irregularly distributed stations, gridded data represents the meteorological variable on a predefined regular grid. Gridded observational data is of strong benefit in disciplines applying distributed quantitative models to examine the influence of weather and climate. Gridded data are also very convenient to provide estimations for any specific location of interest for the user. Gridded observational data covering Belgium at a spatial resolution of 5 km (= 1360 pixels) are available for several variables (precipitations, air temperature, sunshine duration, solar radiation, relative humidity and wind speed) as well as different temporal resolutions (daily, monthly, seasonal, annual values as well as long-term climate averages). The gridded database starts in 1961 for most variables and is updated each day with the available observations of the previous day. All grids are then updated for archiving as soon as the data quality control is completed. In addition to the 5km x 5km grids, spatial averages for all each Belgian municipality are also available. This product is not publically available yet. The daily gridded climate data are available for academic profiles after registration on our open data website.

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

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.