ECMWF will start to welcome staff in new offices in Bonn, Germany, from the summer of 2021 while its headquarters will continue to be in Reading, UK, and its data centre will be in Bologna, Italy. The new location will focus on activities that ECMWF conducts in partnership with the EU, but some of the Centre’s core activities will also move to the new facility.
Whilst the first wave of staff will be accommodated in temporary offices, it is expected that new and permanent ECMWF offices will become available in Bonn in 2026. This move to a multi-site operation aims to foster even more collaboration across Europe. The new offices to open in Bonn will provide ECMWF with a very favourable central location in Europe as well as a high density of world-class scientific institutions in the immediate surroundings, not only in Germany.
With ECMWF’s partnership with the European Union growing over the years, and especially with its role in the EU’s ground-breaking Copernicus Programme, the associated activities had to be moved to a location compatible with EU funding policies relevant to them.
