AEMET

Agencia Estatal de Meteorología
Country: 
Spain
Role in the project: 
Partner

AEMET is a National Agency of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment. It is responsible for the official meteorological and climatological functions in Spain, including aeronautical and maritime services, as well as meteorological support to Defence. The direction and most of the general management activities, as well as most of the technical departments, are located at the AEMET headquarters in Madrid. There are 15 Regional Centres distributed throughout the continental territory and the isles. Each one is responsible for local dependencies (42 observatories and local offices some of them managing specialised functions, 31 aeronautical offices in civil airports and 25 Defence meteorological offices in air bases and other military buildings). There is also a centre for forecasting
services to Defence located in Madrid (CPVD). 10 out of the 15 Regional Centres perform forecasting functions through a "Forecasting Group" (GPV). The total number of staff is slightly over 1,400; about 500 have their working posts at the headquarters and 1,000 at the regional centres and local offices.

AEMET represents Spain at intergovernmental meteorological organisations including the WMO, the ECMWF, EUMETSAT and the IPCC. There is a significant participation of the AEMET in a number of international groups of co-operation between meteorological services, mainly in association with other European countries such as ECOMET, EUMETNET, etc.

AEMET is very actively involved in the development and provision of climate-related services. AEMET currently coordinates at national level the generation of regionalised climate change projections serving as input to numerous studies on impact and adaptation to climate change. AEMET is also very active on operational seasonal forecasting, in particular exploiting and combining the available information on seasonal forecasts coming from different sources. AEMET is also contributing in conjunction with WMO to develop an operational framework to provide regional seasonal forecasts tailored to user needs.