On November 13, I organized a meeting with Météo-France by proposing the following agenda:

• Feedback on opendata in geospatial / openstreetmap. 
• What parallels can we draw between geospatial and weather? What to expect ? How to best anticipate? 
• Benefits of involving a community.
• Organizing a weather hackathon: what is it / why / how?
• Crowdsourcing: Deployment of an amateur network of observers and stations.

In order to enrich the debate, I had invited my counterparts Gaël Musquet toOpenStreetMap France and Romain Tales of the mission Etalab.

This discussion seemed very positive to me, with attentive interlocutors.

I could barely hear a mocking laugh when I told them “Météo-France isn't even on Twitter”. Like a little air of “this thing is useless”.

However, on December 2...

Starting today, this account @Meteo France becomes the official account of Météo-France. Welcome everyone and thank you for following us!

- Météo-France (@meteofrance) December 2, 2013

Today, Météo-France has not only taken to Twitter, but they have made it one of their main means of communication. There recent campaign on the occasion of the commemoration of the landing illustrated it well.

In the continuity of this action, I invited Météo-France to participate in its first "hackathon":

A "hackathon" is a kind of competition where tools and data are made available to people of various backgrounds, so that they can create new innovative uses. It's a very fashionable thing, which makes it possible to show that we are in the movement of the "digital revolution".

The approach was successful, since it has just been officially announced that Météo-France would participate in the event.

This is the hackathon “ Mullein Archipelago ", organized by the Brest Digital Canteen.

Hoist and high! Registration for the 1st Archipel Molène hackathon is open. https://t.co/7DWclr54vY cc @shom_fr @Etalab

– Molène Archipelago (@ArchipelMolene) June 12, 2014

And this is where things get interesting!

On the occasion of this event, Météo-France will provide some data extracts. These will be published freely on the platform date.gouv.fr :

• Geographical area 47°N-49°N, 2°W-6°W, namely Finistère, Côte d'Armor, Morbihan and a little offshore
• 10 sets of temporal data over a month (15GB of data):
• Reflectivity & water depth data, every 5 minutes, for January 2014:
• Hourly observation data from the 29 land stations in the area in January 2014;
• All the parameters and levels of the Arome atmospheric model, at 0.025° resolution, for the 31 runs at midnight in January 00;
• The 3 parameters of the surge model at 1/24th resolution, also for the 31 midnight runs in January 00;
• The 12 parameters of the wave model, at 0.1° resolution, still for the 31 runs at midnight in January 00;
• About ten parameters of the Mocage Air Quality chemistry-transport model, at 0.1° resolution for the 31 runs of the 12-hour network in January 2014;
• Projections of 3 climate scenarios for January 2030 & January 2080, 8 km resolution, normals for the month of January for the 29 land stations in the area;
• the 35 members of the ARPEGE ensemble forecast, for the 31 runs at least in January 2014, at 0.25° resolution;
• 4 types of satellite data, frequency 15 minutes for the month of January 2014, resolution between 1 & 3 km.

Even if it would probably have been more strategic to open these data permanently rather than for a limited period, we must nevertheless applaud the symbolism of this act.

This is the first time that the general public will be able to see and touch the data from Météo-France. We will finally know what they look like.

Because until now, only MF staff, certain researchers and a few companies wealthy could have accessed it.

Hoping that this is not an attempt to relaunch the business of "free samples", but rather a real desire to open up and modernize the institution, we can only salute this approach which is the first stage of a great transformation.

UPDATE : The data is here: https://donneespubliques.meteofrance.fr/donnees_libres/Hackathon/