About WOW-NL

KNMI and RMI join forces

After the UK Met Office announced in 2025 that it would stop the international WOW platform (Weather Observations Website), a unique worldwide network of citizen observations was at risk of disappearing. The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMI) stepped in and arranged a relaunch focused on Belgian weather observers: the platform was relaunched as WOW-BE, fully managed and hosted by RMI.

KNMI joined this initiative and now also offers the platform to Dutch weather observers using a dedicated portal under the name WOW-NL. Both institutes work together on a stable, open and non-commercial platform where participants in the Netherlands and Belgium can share their weather observations.

Improvements over the old WOW

• Simplified station registration, available in multiple languages
• Solar radiation as an additional weather variable
• Clear distinction between relative and absolute air pressure
• Open data and open software platform

Open data

The data contributed by the community remains available to the community. KNMI and RMI consider it important to make this data accessible through an open data platform. The preparations are well underway, with the aim of launching this initiative in the coming months.

Open source

Not only the measurement data, but also the software behind the platform is freely available. This allows anyone to check how the information is processed, and lets the community help to further improve and renew the platform.

In the previous version, the underlying system was managed for many years by the UK Met Office. Out of respect for their great effort, it has now been deliberately decided to make the system fully open. This way we avoid the service suddenly disappearing again in the future, and KNMI and RMI build a sustainable and reliable platform together with the users.

The source code of the WOW-BE platform is publicly available on GitHub: github.com/rmibelgium/wowbe