Team size: Two

Focus on: Our legal team

DMI’s legal team has been involved in the establishment of a cooperation between meteorological institutes of four European countries with the purpose of providing timely and precise weather forecasts, improving public preparedness and resilience and in time being able to offer a deeper understanding of the current and future climate.

A key element to this cooperation has been the procurement of a high-performance computing facility, a ‘supercomputer’, to be shared between the four countries Denmark, Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands. This new purchase offers unprecedented computing power which, among other things, will be used to prepare much more detailed weather forecasts and within a larger area than the previous supercomputer of DMI.

The legal team of DMI has played an important part in setting up the cooperation, from the early start in 2018 with a memorandum of understanding, to building the legal framework and organisation and negotiating a binding agreement between the parties in 2020.

The agreement to build the supercomputer was signed in October 2021 with the company HPE Cray Supercomputers, and it is expected to become operational any day now, latest by third quarter of 2023.

The supercomputer will be placed in Iceland where the relatively cold climate entails less cooling demand. The machine is driven by local waterpower and geothermal energy alone, which limits carbon dioxide emission and the four countries’ operational expenses.

It has been a demanding, but also rewarding, task for the legal team to get deep into the details of high-performance computing, weather forecasting, climate research, and economy. This has been a team effort all the way and without the continued support, patience and specialist knowledge of all of our colleagues on the four meteorological institutes, we would not have reached this cornerstone. This goes to show the importance of the legal profession as a support function, rather than a stand-alone service.

The cooperation is named United Weather Centres West (UWC West) and plans are already made for eleven European countries to come together in 2028 in the cooperation United Weather Centres (UWC). As with UWC West, the legal team of DMI is predicted to play an important part in the shaping and legal foundation of UWC.