ECMWF - European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
| Provider: | European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts |
| Model scope: | Global |
| Update frequency: | every 12 hours |
| Resolution: | 0.25°, 15.0nm, 27.8km |
| Model duration: | 37 forecasts starting at 0 hr, ending at 10 days |
| Parameters: | pressure, wind, rain, temperature, humidity, swell/wave combined, vertical velocity, precipitable water, 250 mb, 500 mb, 850 mb |
| GRIB model date: | Sat Apr 27 00:00:00 2024 UTC |
| Download date: | Sat Apr 27 08:05:02 2024 UTC |
| Download delay: | 8hr 05min |
Note: the Download delay is the amount of time required for the GRIB model to compute its forecast and then for the LuckGrib cluster to download the data and make it available. The LuckGrib delay is generally less than 10 minutes, the remainder of the delay is the model compute time.
Description
The ECMWF, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, sometimes called the Euro model, has long been well respected, and by many, considered to be the (current) leading weather model world wide. Many sailors and meteorologists have wanted access to the ECMWF model.
On January 25th, 2020, ECMWF announced that they were expanding the range of data they are making available to the public. This new public data includes sea level pressure, 10m wind, 2m temperature, wave state, along with wind and height information at various pressure levels, for example: 850mb, 500mb and 250mb (the boundary layer, mid-atmosphere, and the jet stream.) This new data had an original resolution of 0.4 degrees.
On Feb 29th, 2024, this public data was improved in a second announcement. Among other improvements, the resolution of the data has been increased to 0.25 degrees.
Prior to these changes, there was a public domain subset of the ECMWF data which provided sea level pressure, 850mb wind and 500mb height, at a 0.5 degree resolution.
This new data set should be interesting for sailors. Having access to surface wind and pressure allows this data to be used in evaluating ocean routes. This new data can also be used by the LuckGrib Weather Routing system.
In the original 2022 announcement, ECMWF stated:
The plan is to expand open data in the future by adding more data.
Its good to see that this is happening, and it will be interesting to see how their public data continues to evolve. (For example, wind gust data is not yet available.)
ECMWF opening the data up to the public domain is a welcome new addition to the data that sailors and meteorologists now have freely available to them.
Thank you to the ECMWF for making this new data available!
License terms
In ECMWF’s announcement, they noted that the licensing terms for this data are the following:
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.
As is the case with all weather service providers, ECMWF wish to attach a disclaimer to the use of their data:
Disclaimer: ECMWF does not accept any liability whatsoever for any error or omission in the data, their availability, or for any loss or damage arising from their use.
This standard disclaimer applies to all data provided through the LuckGrib service, as has always been the case.
Their is also a copyright statement that applies to the data provided by ECMWF:
Copyright “© [[year]] European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)”.
Where [[year]] is replace with the current year.