The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has announced that a wide range of its forecast data will now be made openly available across the globe.
This move toward ‘open data’ comes after a large range of forecast charts were earlier made available to researchers and the public.
Available data is based on a range of high-resolution forecasts (HRES – 9km horizontal resolution) and ensemble forecasts (ENS – 18km 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 visualize the data, ECMWF has prepared a set of Jupyter notebooks to help users familiar with Python and Jupyter discover the open data set. They can also reproduce the plots from its open forecast charts using ECMWF’s open-source software libraries.
The data is available through ECMWF’s https service and via the Microsoft Azure cloud. In future, the data may also be made available via other cloud providers.
Use of the data is governed by the Creative Commons CC-4.0-BY license and the ECMWF terms of use. This means that the data may be redistributed and used commercially, subject to appropriate attribution.