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SWITCH

Winner 2005

For the second award of the SWITCH Innovation Prize, the jury opted for the meteoblue.ch project submitted by Mathias Müller of the Institute of Meteorology, Climatology and Remote Sensing at the University of Basel.

DThe winner received the prize of CHF 15,000. Prior to this, he and the other three nominated entrants presented their projects at the Museum of Communication in Berne.


See Photos for further pictures.

The jury honoured the winner's project with the following words:

Meteoblue marks the result of research conducted at the Institute of Meteorology of the University of Basel. It is arguably the best very-high-resolution, medium-range weather forecasting system on the planet. meteoblue gives the general public access, at no cost, to a vast range of weather information of relevance to Switzerland and Europe as a whole. It is thus easy to obtain quantitative and graphical predictions for precipitation, temperature, wind speed/direction, cloud cover, humidity and much more.

meteoblue is a superb example of how large-scale data collections and scientific prediction can be put to work for the public good. In order to bring us these forecasts, meteorologists have to collect large amounts of data in real time from sensors on Earth and in orbit. This data has to be fed to computers with a huge amount of power in order to constrain models of weather dynamics that have been carefully developed and verified by painstaking research. meteoblue transforms this complexity into simple displays that enable the public and the government to plan their leisure, optimise their sporting activities, schedule their work projects and prepare for possible threats. The jury recognises the strong and systematic contribution that meteoblue brings to real life. We congratulate them on their success.