The NORMA project is an special action conceded to Puertos del Estado in the National Plan framework of Scientific Investigation, Development and Technologic Innovation 2000-2003.

The availability of meteorological registers coming from automatic weather stations, is essential in a great number of applications and studies related to agriculture, environment, alternative energies, weather analysis and prediction, transport, construction planning and other industrial activities. Therefore, different public (center and autonomic administrations) and private organisms have installed automatic weather stations whose registers are of unquestionable utility. Despite of that, there are not clear and standardized criteria to use the tools, to select the emplacements, to analyze the records, to exchange information and metadata using protocols, that could allow the use of the data obtained in the different networks, independently of the purpose for which they were generated. At the same time, there have been and there are still, numerous initiatives to install meteorological instrumentation, often with huge economic investments, that ignore the existence of the nets whose records rarely are offered to the technicians or scientific communities.

The general objective of the NORMA project is the composition of a regulation body to guarantee the quality of weather databases generated by automatic stations nets. At the same time, it pretends to allow the exchange and accessibility through an Internet Site, to make able the exploitation of the records form Spanish automatic weather stations in a rational and shared way.