Description
There are several national weather centers which are running global weather models. NOAA produces GFS, the Canadian Meteorological Service produces GDPS, the German weather service (DWD) produces ICON, and there are several others.
Some of the weather models are made available to the public at no charge and others are available only as a paid service. One of the weather models that is only available as a paid service is the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts).
As you would imagine, competition between the various weather services to produce the most skillful forecasts is intense. At the time this article was written, one of the most skillful weather models is ECMWF. This does not mean that its forecasts are always correct, but it compares well to its competition. There are times when GFS (or the newer FV3-GFS) produces a better forecast, but the ECMWF forecast is very well respected in the weather industry.
Access to the full ECMWF is available only as a paid service, and there are limitations on how the data can be used or shared. (Some examples of the pricing are here.)
ECMWF also provides a service where they allow access to the model where the public domain vesion has a reduced spatial resolution, reduced time resolution and is only available for a limited number of parameters. A quote from their web site:
These products are available to the public and their use is unrestricted (including commercial use)
This version of the ECMWF model may be useful as a comparison to the other models available through LuckGrib.
This model model may be useful for research purposes. You can download this version of ECMWF and perform a quick check to see how it is forecasting sea level pressure or 500mb heights compared to GFS, GDPS, FV3-GFS or the other models.