Improving the accessibility of ECMWF open weather forecast data and charts: maintenance challenges

ECMWF's move towards an extensive free and open data policy is approaching its final phase, extending its user base far beyond operational forecasters in Member and Co-operating States and other licensed customers. Beginning in 2020, the first phase saw the opening of hundreds of web forecast charts (www.charts.ecmwf.int) and made archived data available under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) open licence. This transition continued in January 2022 with the introduction of a free and open subset of real-time forecast data, with ongoing updates incorporating new parameters and datasets. Notably, the latest updates in 2024 included increasing the resolution from 0.4° to 0.25° and including the new Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS) forecast data.
This phased move towards free and open data supports the UN EW4All initiative and also aims to support creativity, innovation and reproducibility in scientific research and weather applications. However, this can not be achieved by only opening the real time and archived data. The users need to be able to find and easily use the data and integrate it into their own research work or application workflows.
To address this, additional efforts are underway to improve the data's FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) attributes. Key developments include the creation of open source Python libraries for data downloading, processing and visualisation under the EarthKit umbrella, alongside the introduction of a set of Jupyter notebooks, each of which is reproducing one open weather forecast chart - from the downloading the data to processing and visualisation.
However, the tools and data constantly change, and keeping up with these changes in the example Jupyter notebooks presents a significant challenge if not designed with the maintenance in mind.
This talk will provide an overview of the open forecast web charts and the use of Jupyter notebooks for their reproduction, followed by an exploration of the maintenance challenges and future plans.