Welcome to WOW-BE, the crowdsourcing platform of the RMI! With WOW-BE (Weather Observations Website – Belgium), anyone with an automatic weather station can share, view and further explore weather observations.
The RMI’s own platform
WOW started in 2011 as a UK Met Office project and grew into a worldwide network of automatic weather stations run by private individuals. As a WOW partner, the RMI offered that platform in Belgium under the name WOW-BE.
After the UK Met Office announced in 2025 that it would stop managing WOW centrally, the RMI opted for a platform of its own. On 31 December 2025, WOW-BE was disconnected from WOW Met Office; since then, WOW-BE has been fully managed and hosted by the RMI. WOW Met Office will be discontinued at the end of 2026.
This way, owners of a personal weather station can continue to share their observations on a stable, open and non-commercial platform.
Improvements over WOW Met Office
- Simplified station registration, available in Dutch, French and English
- Solar radiation as an additional weather variable
- Clear distinction between relative and absolute air pressure
- Open data and open software platform
Why WOW-BE matters to the RMI
Weather and climate concern us all. WOW-BE sparks interest in meteorology and climatology, especially among the younger generation. WOW-BE also has a scientific mission: the observations give the RMI information about places where it does not measure itself, and about very local phenomena that slip through the gaps in the observation network.
- Finer-grained measurements: the official Belgian synoptic network has around 30 stations, roughly one station per 1,000 km². Very local phenomena, such as urban heat or wind gusts, therefore sometimes escape the measurements. WOW-BE observations help with the real-time assessment of extreme weather and with its analysis afterwards.
- Additional information: most WOW-BE stations do not meet the strict requirements of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), but precisely because of that they provide information from other environments, for example on the urban heat island effect, a subject the RMI does a great deal of research on.
- Crowdsourcing: citizen observations also come with “noise”, for example from a poorly sited station or a technical defect. Filtering out that noise is an integral part of working with WOW-BE data.
Open data
The data contributed by the community remains available to the community. The RMI will therefore make the WOW-BE data openly available. Preparations are under way.
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.
By making the system fully open, we avoid the service suddenly disappearing again in the future, and the RMI builds a sustainable and reliable platform together with its users.
The source code of WOW-BE is publicly available on GitHub: github.com/rmibelgium/wowbe
RMI and KNMI join forces
The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) has also joined this initiative. KNMI offers the platform to Dutch weather observers under the name WOW-NL. Dutch participants therefore also register their station on the WOW-BE platform, which is managed and hosted by the RMI.
Both institutes work together on a stable, open and non-commercial platform where participants in Belgium and the Netherlands can share their weather observations. This preserves a unique network of citizen observations that complements the official observation networks of both the RMI and KNMI.