Since July 2020, the DWD has been offering the crowdsourcing module User Reports in its WarnWetter app. This gives app users the opportunity to make their own reports on current weather and severe weather events available to the DWD and other users. The data are now also made available on Open Data in daily packages.

The user reports are snapshots of the current weather conditions at a location at a certain point in time. They have the advantage of collecting information on the weather near the ground, where there is no weather station in the immediate vicinity. These can then supplement the data network. In particular, striking weather events can be well assessed through the impact of user data and improve warning management.

No advanced quality assurance is carried out for the user reports, but a largely correct meteorological assessment of the weather situation by the reporters is assumed. With the help of reference data sets, an instantaneous filtering of false reports takes place. In addition, meteorological false alerts can also be reported manually by users. Thus, users are granted a certain meteorological estimation of the weather situation. Through crowdsourcing, the truth of the report can also be checked for plausibility: The more reports are submitted at a location at a certain time, the more likely an event is.

The user reports are made available in the Open Data portal in GeoJson format. The retention period is 60 days. Adjustments to the data are possible at any time and are announced via the RSS feed. Each file contains the accumulated messages of one day (00:00 UTC to 23:59 UTC) and is provided with a 24h delay.

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