The new Swiss severe weather warning centre (www.meteocentrale.ch) started operation in December 2006. A team of five skilled meteorologists is exclusively monitoring and forecasting weather in Switzerland on a 24 h/7d basis. A plethora of technical devices (radar, satellite, lightning detection, cell-tracking) and, above all, model data help the forecaster. The mesoscale models from UK Met Office (NAE and NX with a 4 × 4 km grid) are mainly used.
Forecaster issues warning in principle (e.g. for small-scale thunderstorms) for the more than 2000 Swiss communities, which are combined to about 151 warning areas. Warning tresholds a clearly defined and revisable by everybody. Warnings and weather reviews are in four languages.
The installation of new stations (100 in the year 2007, further 100 in the year 2008) provide the weather data in high temporal and local resolution, necessary for serious weather warning but provide also insight into unknown meteorological phenomena – not only in remote alpine valleys.
Forecasting is facilitated with MOS-forecasts. This model output statistics system is developed in-house with output depending on various numerical global models, later on the many perturbation of the ECMWF ensemble.
Further developments are new communication channels (SMS-service) and more and more information on the internet-site.