Météo-France is the French national meteorological service, an ISO 9001:2015-certified public sector body placed under the authority of the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, in charge of Transportation. Météo-France has been designated by executive order as the exclusive provider of meteorological services to air navigation over French national territory, including overseas, in accordance with Single European Sky EU regulation. In this context, the organisation’s main goals are: to integrate meteorological innovation so as to improve safety and regularity of «en route» traffic and to develop decision-making tools on major hubs (CDM: collaborative decision making). Météo-France operates a 24/24 7/7 service to air navigation by providing legacy products and also innovative MET forecast solutions to the aviation community at local, regional and global scales. To support this service, Météo-France runs an ambitious and wide ranging R&D program into aviation meteorology (e.g. nowcasting, Numerical Weather Prediction systems including ensemble prediction system, information systems), and also studies the climate change and its foreseeable impacts
Météo-France is a major player in R&D programmes in order to improve weather-related services to air navigation with regard to flight safety (e.g. weather hazards such as convection or clear air turbulence), to traffic regularity (e.g. providing parameters to calculate optimal trajectories and thus limiting fuel consumption), to a better management of the stream of inbound and outbound traffic by developing very high-resolution models over major airports and their vicinity. The overall goal is to improve air transport in terms of environmental impact as much as in terms of cost and safety. Météo-France has been involved in collaboration with the other partners in SESAR WP11.2 on the definition and development of the MET-GATE concept and successfully led this EUMETNET partners’ activity to the awarding process of the SWIM Master Class 2015. In addition, Météo-France is highly involved in the OGC program for web-services development and standardization.