We are excited to announce that, as of 05 March 2026, the OpenIFS model from ECMWF is available under the Apache 2.0 open-source licence.
This is a big step forward for our model’s user community. Moving to Apache 2.0 means you are now free to use, modify, and share the model under the terms of the open-source licence, making it much easier to collaborate, experiment, and build new developments on top of OpenIFS.
The official open-source release of the ECMWF OpenIFS model is available here:
https://github.com/ecmwf-ifs/openifs
Please note that the GitHub repository above is the only location where the open-source OpenIFS model is now available and where new model versions will be released.
Previous versions of OpenIFS (downloaded from the tarball download site, the ftp server, or ECMWF Bitbucket) that have so far been used under the ECMWF OpenIFS software licence agreement are not open source and should be replaced with this new GitHub release if you want to benefit from the open-source licence, future new model releases, and ongoing contributions.
We look forward to seeing the expanded opportunities this change will bring to model’s user community.
The OpenIFS Team at ECMWF