Weather and climate information are the basis of planning and decisions, both in the private and in the public sector. Depending on the application, climate time series (retrospective) or forecasts (prognostic) are required. In the future, a further increase in interest in usage is to be expected here.

Since mid-2017, the DWD has been commissioned to make its weather and climate information available, largely free of charge. These are constantly updated via a web portal and include climate time series, analyzes, current measurements and forecasts. The relevant data for decision-making processes are therefore available to a wide range of users within the scope of the applicable terms of use.

However, the full potential can not yet be exploited, because many potential users of high-quality weather and climate information do not have the necessary know-how or the necessary tools to use the complex data. There is a lack of simple interfaces between DWD’s data offerings and a large number of potential beneficiaries and consumers. The latter must be able to filter the meteorological data, translate it, if necessary, combine it with other information and make it available in a form that can be easily used by a larger group of users.

The goal of the FAIR project is therefore primarily to improve the usability of weather and climate data for the economy and society. For this purpose, three different sub-goals are defined:

• Improvement of the data access to the data of the DWD
• The development and improvement of data-based applications
• The improvement of the data basis for the DWD, as well as for third-party applications

Within FAIR, the Networked Embedded Systems group is working on the collection of blanket data through crowdsourcing. Towards this end, the members of the group are developing algorithms to collect reliable weather-related data (temperature, air pressure, etc.) with regular smartphones.