About the DMG

First there was the BMG

The BMG was established in 1996, based on an agreement formulated at MOTNEG/2. The reason was, that the MOTNEG identified the need for a working group, taking care of the management of the OPMET-data exchange within the ICAO/EUR region. The group should review existing requirements and respond in a controlled way to planned changes of those. The first ToRs where the following:

to examine the existing EUR requirements and any new requirements and to assess the feasibility of satisfying these requirements, taking into account the availability of the data;
if necessary, to re-organise bulletins through the change of existing bulletins or addition of new bulletins, based on the validated requirements;
to route all bulletins to SADIS and to the existing MOTNE Centres;
the States should be informed 1 month in advance about changes in the programme by notification from the ICAO Office in Paris;
the group should report its activities to the MOTNEG

The initial members of the BMG where MOTNEG members from

Austria
Belgium
Denmark
France
Germany
Netherlands
Romania
United Kingdom

From the MOTNEG to METG

For 5 years the BMG acted as a working group of the MOTNEG. In 2001 the decision was taken to dissolve the parent group. This was brought to the attention of EANPG/43 with the suggestion, that the BMG should be continued as a sub-group of the METG, which was approved.

Within the years 2007-2010 the MOTNE structure was reviewed by the BMG, which consisted of 11 MOTNE-centres. Within a short time, it was clear that this setup was inefficient, especially when taking into consideration today's technology. The discussion led to the conclusion, that the most efficient solution would be to have 3 main centres within the EUR-region to fulfil the needs of inter-regional OPMET-data exchange. The BMG decided that those three centres are:

London
Toulouse
Vienna

The data exchange system was renamed from MOTNE into EUR-RODEX. With its new structure the possibility was identified to implement a backup procedure to overcome an outage of one of the ROCs. This procedure is planned to be in place by the end of 2022.

That was also the moment, when BMG was renamed (after 38 meetings) into DMG. Also the composition and the number of members changed (from 13 to 8). Of course, all these changes were accepted and agreed upon by the METG during METG/20 (06.-10.09.2010). The first meeting of the renewed group took place in October 2010. Current members and their roles can be found under DMG-Members.

Implementing ROC Moscow

In 2019 a project was started to implement a forth ROC, namely ROC Moscow, for some PT-EAST States (as it has been called in the beginning). In the following years Moscow undertook all neccessary steps (technical as well as procedural) to fulfil all requirements of a ROC (as defined in ICAO EUR DOc 018). States in the possible Area of Responsibility (AoR) were contacted and asked to opt either to change to ROC Moscow or stay with ROC Vienna. The details on the final layout can be found in the "Procedures" part under Distribution Determination.

The official implementation of ROC Moscow has been accomplished and reflected in ICAO documentation in 2022.

Current tasks and developments

There is a number of regular tasks (like data monitoring exercises) performed by the DMG. Throughout the last years the DMG focused on topics like:

The transition from TAC to IWXXM
The implementation of ROC Moscow

The next years the dominant topic will be the implementation of SWIM in the EUR-region. All tasks of the DMG can be found in the Terms of Reference as well as in the Work Program, defined and agreed upon by METG, which can be found on the dedicated page on this website.