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From 25 January 2022, a wide range of ECMWF’s forecast data across the globe will be openly available. This move towards ‘open data’ comes after a large range of forecast charts were earlier made available to anybody interested in them.

The data that are becoming available are based on a range of high-resolution forecasts (HRES – 9 km horizontal resolution) and ensemble forecasts (ENS – 18 km horizontal resolution). They will be made accessible at a resolution of 0.4 x 0.4 degrees.

While many programming languages can be used to access and visualise the data, ECMWF has prepared a set of Jupyter notebooks to help users familiar with Python and Jupyter discover the open dataset. They can also reproduce the plots from our open forecast charts using our open-source software libraries.

An overview of what kinds of data are available is given on the ECMWF website. More detailed explanations of how to access the data are also available. The plan is to expand open data in the future by adding more data.

The data are available through ECMWF’s https service and via the Microsoft Azure cloud. In future, they may also be made available via other cloud providers. 

Use of the data is governed by the Creative Commons CC-4.0-BY licence and the ECMWF Terms of Use. This means that the data may be redistributed and used commercially, subject to appropriate attribution. 

Jupyter notebooks for reproducing open chart plots using open data can be accessed via the top right-hand menu of the available plots.

ECMWF looks forward to user feedback, which will help the open data provision to evolve.