• Programme
  • Documents
  • Co-operation area
  • Who are the partners?
  • Funding
  • • Fostering innovations
    • Internal and external accessibility
    • Baltic Sea as a common resource
    • Attractive & competitive cities and regions
    Priorities
  • ENPI
  • Management structure
  • Preparation of 2014-2020
  • EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region
  • Baltic context
• About projects
  • Funded projects
  • Output library
  • Project database
  • Energy cluster
  • Innovation cluster
  • Water cluster
  • Transport cluster
• Contacts
  • Monitoring Committee
  • Joint Technical Secretariat
  • Managing Authority
  • Certifying Authority
  • Audit Authority
  • Links
  • Other funding sources
  • Joint Programming Committee 2014–2020
• News
  • Newsletter
  • Publications
  • Galleries
  • Videos

show/hide project search

---

---

---

Information Manager:

Estonian Environmental Agency
Mustamäe tee 33
10616 Estonia Tallinn
EE
Triin Metsallik
E-mail: triin@baltrad.eu
Phone: +372 666 0903
Fax: +372 666 0909

---

Summary description of the project:

Accurate and timely weather forecasts warn of hazardous conditions e.g. snow storms, hail, freezing rain, or floods, they can help save lives and property, and they can help optimize activities for several sectors of the economy. Weather radar systems are capable of monitoring rain, snow, hail and wind over large geographical areas in both time and space. Several such systems can be networked to cover countries, regions and eventually continents. During the main stage project BALTRAD the world’s most advanced international weather radar network has been developed and deployed. The BALTRAD network is decentralized, preserving the partnerships transnational integrity. BALTRAD delivers value-added precipitation information to improve short-term weather forecasts. The BALTRAD network has successfully demonstrated deployment by integrating data from 50 weather radars in ten countries into the system and forms the basis for the BALTRAD+ project.

BALTRAD+ is an initiative of the national weather and hydrological services in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, Norway and Belarus. These are the institutes that own and operate the radars in each country, and that will be responsible for ensuring sustainability at the end of the project. The further development and deployment of the system is only possible by close co-operations with these partners as each partner not only provides their data, they all have complementary skills and experiences that are deployed through a transnational cooperation. In addition, the partnership comprises also local, regional and national authorities to use the forecasts to improve their services for society. The national radiation and nuclear safety authority in Finland, Aarhus Water and Aalborg University act as end-users in the project and have therefore an influence on the developments.

The main objective of BALTRAD+ has been to transform the real-time weather radar network created in the main stage project into a permanent operational element of regional infrastructure, with proven value to forecasters and decision-makers. On the operational side the objectives were to ensure that the real-time data exchange and works seamless, enhance the functionality for each partner to process the data using a harmonized set of methods, and to reduce imbalances in exchange, production and use of radar-based information in the Baltic Sea Region. On the end-users side, a regular end-user and an Advisory Committee has been established in order to target real-world weather and flood forecasting activities. Finally, the transferability from regional to local scale with higher resolution has been demonstrated.

Achievements of the project so far:

Building on the achievements of the main-stage project BALTRAD the work on the tasks to further develop the BALTRAD network in its functionality and completeness continued seamlessly. The main achievements are:

- Several tools that are needed to jointly develop the BALTRAD system in an efficient manner and to foster the cooperation of the system developers have been implemented. Preference has been given to open source solutions, a prerequisite to guarantee that the final results of the project will be available for the public.

- Towards the end of the project Version 2.0 of the BALTRAD system has been rolled out. The software package is freely available at http://git.baltrad.eu/

- One of the cornerstones in managing weather radar data is quality assurance. It is not trivial to specify and to deploy methods, procedures and algorithms for a harmonized processing of data according to agreed principles. Meanwhile several algorithms to improve the quality of weather radar data

have been implemented and validated. The documentation on how quality assurance will be achieved is documented and publicly available (http://git.baltrad.eu/trac/wiki/cookbook/

Well- defined and thoroughly- implemented quality assurance guarantees that differences in the quality of the final products (e.g. rain and snowfall estimates short term weather forecasts) are minimized of the same quality irrespectively from which operator of weather radar systems the raw data are delivered. The end-users throughout the Baltic Sea Region will benefit from this.

- Addressing the needs of end-users and receiving feedback from practitioners is a focus of the project. Taking account of the experiences from the main-stage project we are organising in each reporting period a so-called “BALTRAD User Forum). The first event of this type has been held on 15/16th May 2012 in Krakow, Poland. The second BALTRAD user forum was held on 4/5th December in Norrköping, Sweden. The third user forum took place

on 16th May 2013 in Vilnius. The fourth user forum took place on 21/22nd November 2013 in Berlin.

- BALTRAD reached interests beyond the BSR region. The Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center (UHMC), the national meteorological institute in Ukraine and the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (ROSHYDROMET) joined the partnership by signing the BALTRAD Cooperation Agreement. This agreement governs the mutual exchange of weather radar data for official use of the partners beyond the project lifetime and includes provisions for new members to join. Furthermore, a co-operation with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been achieved.

---

---

List of partners