Uptake of the ECMWF Open Data Programme

ECMWF is a leading provider of weather information, and its products and weather data make contributions to a huge range of activities in service provision, research and for the protection of life and property via National Weather Services and humanitarian agencies. 

Since 2020, ECMWF has been implementing an open data policy, recognising that open data under Creative Commons licensing is an essential tool in contributing to the development of new meteorological methods and is encouraging innovation and progress in the weather and climate domains.

ECMWF plans to achieve this goal by 2026. A number of steps have been taken to increase the open data available to users and in the last year ECMWF has built on this further. The data currently released as open data are a subset of ECMWF Real-time catalogue at 0.25 degree resolution, from both ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) and Artificial Intelligence/Integrated Forecasting System (AIFS).

The usage statistics on ECMWF open data for 2023 show a significant increase of user adoption with respect to the previous year, indicating the users are engaging with ECMWF open data offerings.

ECMWF Open Data are provided through different mechanisms, all of which have seen a notable growth in usage in 2023:

• Open Charts Service, which provides chart visualisations of ECMWF products. Some of the increased uptake can be attributed to the introduction of charts based on Machine learning products in mid-2023.
• The Open Data Portal (FTP service) is available since January 2022 and shows a continuing increase in numbers of requests. ECMWF predicts even higher usage with the addition of new Open Data of IFS products at higher resolution and additional parameters, plus AIFS products (machine learning-based) in early 2024.
• WMO Essential and WMO Additional datasets (also provided via FTP service) are still increasingly popular. ECMWF will, in the future, optimise this provision, possibly merging it with the open data offering.
• Since January 2022, ECMWF Open Data is also redistributed by 3^rd ECMWF has partnered with different cloud providers as part of their public dataset program (e.g. Amazon, Google and Microsoft), but the data has also started being provided by smaller independent users (e.g. Open-meteo.de) and in research archives (e.g. NCAR). The benefit is not only a good user uptake but also that data can be shared with a larger user community with no additional load on ECMWF systems.

ECMWF is committed to moving forward to achieve the goal of an open data policy over the next few years. Creative Commons licences will be applied to further datasets, while reducing and eventually removing the cost of data. The main objective of these changes is to continue to encourage collaboration, innovation and progress within the meteorological and climate science communities.