Following the removal of the Information Cost on 1 October 2025, the transition to Open Data continues to progress well.
Users report smoother ordering workflows, and ECMWF has observed increased adoption of the IFS and AIFS Open Datasets.
For example, in June 2025, users downloaded around 100 million files totalling 833 TB. By November 2025, this had risen to roughly 200 million downloads and 1,292 TB, based on figures from the ECMWF Free & Open Data Portal: https://data.ecmwf.int/ (not including data retrieved from AWS, Azure or Google Cloud).
Three new parameters were also recently added: Total cloud cover (tcc), Snow depth (sd) and Snowfall (sf) to the IFS Open Dataset.
To help visualise the data access and licence structure, including where Free and Open Data sits, please refer to the attached image.
We thank all users for their constructive engagement throughout this transition.
ECMWF Support