Meteoblue is a meteorological service created at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in cooperation with the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Environmental Prediction Centers. In 2006, Meteoblue was founded as a spin-off company in order to serve customers, especially in the area of agriculture, as well as solar and wind energy. The impetus for the creation of this service came with the Sandoz chemical disaster near Basel in 1986. During the fire, health and safety services sought information on wind direction to protect the poisonous and harmful gases. After receiving contradictory information from the Swiss, French and German meteorological services (Basel is in the tripoint of these three countries), researchers from the local university formed the Institute of Meteorology, Climatology and Remote Sensing with the intention of modeling the local meteorological situation with more precision. Since this meteorological service did not yet have its own dedicated data center, weather forecasts provided through the university's website were not available at all times, but the service soon became a preferred source of information for climbers, paragliders , astronomers and farmers. After the transition to a private meteorological company, meteoblue was the world's first meteorological service to offer weather prediction in a graphical synopsis for any arbitrarily chosen place on earth. In addition, it predicts the climate for several continents on scales that are not familiar from other meteorological services, eg. Europe using a 3 km grid, covering an area containing Belarus, Greece, Portugal and Ireland, or sub-Saharan Africa with a grid of 10 km. Both non-hydrostatic mesoscale models (NMM, developed by NOAA) and the NOAA Environment Modeling System (NEMS) are used to predict time. The meteorological service is still publicly available, supported by advertisements, on its website, and the university's meteorological research institute is still tied to meteoblue weather predictions. Sources
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