A2P at Meteomatics
Last Friday, 14 students, mainly from the University of Bern and ETH Zurich, visited Meteomatics in St. Gallen as part of the "Academia Meets Practice (A2P)" event. Over the course of a roughly four‑hour afternoon, we gained a varied and exciting insight into the wide range of activities Meteomatics is involved in.
After a short introduction, we headed straight to the rooftop, where Yohan launched a weather balloon with us, equipped with a self‑developed glider for its return journey – more on that later. From there, we were guided floor by floor through the office departments, the production facilities for meteodrones and their meteobases, as well as the warehouse. Along the way, Joachim told us more about Meteomatics, interesting customer requests, current challenges, and the company’s ever‑evolving ideas.
Ramon’s presentation on the meteodrones was briefly interrupted by Yohan, who took us along via videocall to witness the landing of the meteo glider on its "landing field" just outside city. Afterwards, we even had the opportunity to hold a weather drone in our hands ourselves. To conclude, Anatol presented Meteomatics’ numerical weather prediction models, including Euro1k and US1k, as well as the vision of a global model with 1‑km resolution – a vision that could soon become reality.
Impressed and inspired, we finally set off on our journey home. A heartfelt thank‑you goes to Joachim for organising the event and for his warm welcome, as well as to Yohan, Ramon, Anatol, and the entire Meteomatics team for their time and for the fascinating insights into their daily work.