Estimating Storage Requirements for ERA6 Data

Datasets and Usage C3S - Datasets and Usage
1

Hello,

I am about to estimate our future storage requirements for locally storing a subset of ERA6 data at native resolution (1H data). Specifically, I am interested in surface (sf), model (ml), and pressure (pl) level data, and would like to roughly calculate the storage requirements by parameter.

Could you provide any indications on how the file size per parameter (1 file with 24 hourly time steps) will roughly be? Alternatively, are there any prototype files available that I could check to get a better sense of the file structure?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Angelika

2

Dear Angelika, it will probably be between 3-4 times larger than for ERA5.
That’s for data in regular lat-lon. For ERA6 we plan to store the data in it’s native grid (which has less grid points towards the poles) so if you can handle those that would be a savings of about 60%, i.e. Increase 0.6*(3-4) = 2-2.5 larger than reg lat-lon ERA5.

Regards,
Hans