What does "fully open data status in 2025" mean?

Datasets and Usage Open data
1

ECMWF has announced that they will go fully Open-Data in October 2025 see press release

We asked ourself what does that mean in terms of spatial and temporal resolution of the different datasets?

Are they provided on their native grid and temporal resolution? E.g. the extended range forecast?

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Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your query.

For ECMWF, Open means a permissive licence will apply and there will be no cost for the data itself, but delivery charges may apply.

In this case, the CC-BY-4 licence will apply to the full contents of the ECMWF Real-time Catalogue at all resolutions/time steps. The Information Cost (cost per data) will be removed, but delivery charges will still apply for bulk download, area subsetting, formatting, customisation, etc.

We hope to release a free subset at 0.1 degrees in October, but the products within this subset are yet to be confirmed.

The extended range is already ‘open’ (it has a CC-BY-4 licence) - you can access this via the S2S public dataset or if you want it directly from ECMWF, Service Charges would still apply and you’d need to submit a quote here.

Hope this helps and happy to answer any further questions!

Kind regards,
Emma

1 Like
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Hi Emma,

This sounds very exciting. Can you expand a bit on what this 0.1 degree subset you mention means?

For example, what parameters will be made available?

We would be very happy to provide any inputs to the set of parameters chosen.

Best regards,

Joachim Kønigslieb

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Hi Joachim,

Currently, we’re not planning to expand the existing parameter dataset while we make the transition. We need to be cautious of the size of the data, and the load on the operational system. The current open data is described here: Open data | ECMWF

Once we’ve put this into place, we will review the parameters themselves and potentially expand in the coming years to maximise the usefulness.

As we produce around 100TB per day, it’s quite a challenge to serve it all and much of it might not be used!

We’re happy to take suggestions and we keep a list of requests for the open data.

Best wishes,
Emma