About WOW-NL

KNMI and RMI join forces

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

The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) joined this initiative and now also offers the platform to Dutch weather observers under the name WOW-NL. Both institutes work together to provide a stable, open and non-commercial platform for citizen scientists in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Improvements over the old WOW

• Station registration available in Dutch, French and English
• Solar radiation added as a weather variable
• Clear distinction between relative and absolute air pressure measurements
• 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. Preparations are well underway, with the aim of launching this initiative during 2026.

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 WOW-BE/WOW-NL is publicly available on GitHub: github.com/rmibelgium/wowbe