ECMWF moves to open data

ECMWF is committed to move to an open data policy gradually over the next few years. ECMWF has already released hundreds of web forecast charts and made archived data available with a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) open licence in 2020. The potential uses and benefits these products bring for a range of users and sectors is vast and particularly key in less economically developed countries and has the potential to supercharge research efforts leading to improvement in weather predictions and delivering important socio-economic benefits.  

Making these products available with CC BY 4.0 licences means that users can now share, redistribute and adapt the information as they need, including for commercial applications, as long as they acknowledge ECMWF as the source. Archived data from all past ECMWF forecasts offer immense opportunities for machine learning, where a computer uses observations or other data, to ‘learn’ relationships between different variables and will support ECMWF Machine Learning Roadmap to 2030.  

The next steps will be presented and will involve an expansion of the free and open datasets already available to increase their use by targeted audiences in real-time. ECMWF recognizes that giving free access to all data holdings in real-time will be technically challenging in the short and medium term. The plan is to maintain paid-for delivery services for demanding applications that require access to large volumes of data with a service level agreement. This phased move towards free and open data aims to support creativity and innovation in the field of scientific research as well as weather applications.  

Furthermore, to facilitate the efficient access and processing of such large volumes of data, ECMWF is piloting cloud solutions for organisations of Member States in collaboration with EUMETSAT and is investigating fast connections with commercial public clouds.