Deutscher Wetterdienst  The () or DWD for short, is the German Meteorological Service, based in Offenbach am Main, Germany, which monitors weather and meteorological conditions over Germany and provides weather services for the general public and for nautical, aviational or agricultural purposes. It is attached to the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure. The DWDs principal tasks include warning against weather-related dangers and monitoring and rating climate changes affecting Germany. The organization runs atmospheric models on their supercomputer for precise weather forecasting. The DWD also manages the national climate archive and one of the largest specialized libraries on weather and climate worldwide. The DWD was formed in 1952 when the weather services of the western occupation zones were merged. In 1954, the Federal Republic of Germany joined the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). In 1975 the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) was formed for numerical weather prediction up to ten days in advance. In 1990, following the reunification, the weather services of the German Democratic Republic were incorporated in the DWD. Since the 1990s, the DWD has continuously reduced the number of manned weather stations, which entailed substantial staff cutbacks. The DWD does not expect a reduction in forecast quality, given techniques like weather radar or satellites, which have significantly improved weather data collection. The German Meteorological Service runs a global hydrostatic model of its own, the GME (superseded by ICON in 2015), using a hexagonal icosahedral grid since 2002. They developed the High Resolution Regional Model (HRM) in 1999, which is widely run within the operational and research meteorological communities and run with hydrostatic assumptions. The German non-hydrostatic Lokal-Modell for Europe (LME) has been run since 2002, and an increase in areal domain became operational on September 28, 2005. Since March 2009, the DWD operates a NEC SX-9 with a peak performance of 109 teraFLOPS to help in the weather forecasting process. The DWD also operates two other NWP services, COSMO-EU (Europe region) and COSMO-DE (Germany and surrounding region), with higher resolution than the ICON. The COSMO algorithm is maintained by the COSMO consortium, a cooperation of many European countries. It uses ICON data as input in DWD's setup. Since 2005, the DWD has been publishing regional warnings against heat with the aim to reduce heat related fatalities.