Free NWP data
The following list was compiled by IEA Wind Task 51 Forecasting for the Weather Driven Energy System.
| MET. SERVICE/MODEL | URL | FORMAT | ADDITIONAL INFORMATION |
| ENVIRONMENT CANADA | weather.gc.ca/grib/ | GRIB2 | Environment Canada GRIB data |
| Environment Canada / GDPS | weather.gc.ca/grib/grib2_glb_25km_e.html | GRIB2 | Global Deterministic Forecast System (GDPS) 0.24° grid |
| DEUTSCHER WETTERDIENST DWD, Germany | opendata.dwd.de/weather/nwp/ | GRIB2 | NWP models of DWD |
| DWD / ICON | opendata.dwd.de/weather/nwp/icon/grib | GRIB2 | Global ICON, triangular grid |
| DWD / ICON-EPS | opendata.dwd.de/weather/nwp/icon-eps/grib | GRIB2 | ICON-EPS, triangular grid |
| DWD / ICON-EU | opendata.dwd.de/weather/nwp/icon/grib-eu | GRIB2 | ICON-EU, regular grid |
| DWD / ICON-EPS | opendata.dwd.de/weather/nwp/icon-eu-eps/grib | GRIB2 | ICON-EU-EPS, triangular grid |
| ECMWF | https://data.ecmwf.int/forecasts/ or Microsof’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS (see more information) |
GRIB2 | See description at open-data and more information at ECMWF open data: real-time forecats from IFS and AIFS |
| FMI, Finnland | https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/open-data or https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/open-data-manual-forecast-models for gridded model data |
GRIB1, GRIB2, netCDF | HARMONIE Scandinavia: Only limited number of parameters, winds only at 10m. Possible to set download domain |
| METEO FRANCE | donneespubliques.meteofrance.fr/ | GRIB2 | Open Data (Donnees publiques) of Meteo France |
| Meteo France / NWP models | donneespubliques.meteofrance.fr/?fond=rubrique&id_rubrique=51 | GRIB2 | NWP model data |
| Meteo France / ARPEGE | donneespubliques.meteofrance.fr/?fond=produit&id_produit=130&id_rubrique=51 | GRIB2 | Global model ARPEGE: global 0.5° Europe 0.1° |
| MISTRAL, Italy | https://meteohub.mistralportal.it/app/data/datasets | GRIB2 | COSMO-2I Italy, COSMO-5M Mediterranean, and others. Sign in to select individual records |
| NCEP, USA | nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/ | GRIB2 | Many NWP models of NCEP, several access methods |
| NCEP / GFS (grib_filter) | nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/filter_gfs_0p25.pl | GRIB2 | GFS grib_filter 0.25° to cut out sub domains |
| NCEP / GFS Ensemble (grib_filter) | nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/filter_gens_0p50.pl | GRIB2 | GFS ensemble 0.5° grib_filter to cut out sub domains |
| KNMI, Netherlands | data.knmi.nl/datasets | GRIB1 | go to HARMONIE-AROME forecasts for NW-Europe |
| NORWEGIAN MET. INSTITUTE | http://thredds.met.no/thredds/metno.html | netCDF | netCDF data of MetCoOp Ensemble Prediction System and AROME Arctic |
| SMHI, Sweden | https://opendata.smhi.se/apidocs/metfcst/index.html | JSON | Only limited number of parameters: Winds only at 10m |
Each GRIB record contains the data and the meta data for its description, including information on the horizontal grid. Unlike netCDF, the grid must not be contained in a file, only a description of the grid.
An important concept of GRIB is that the variables don’t have names. They are identified by numbers. In GRIB2 it is a triple for discipline, category and parameter number. All tools show variable names. However, they are given via tables used by the software. This means that different tools may show you different variable names for exactly the same GRIB record.
The Wikipedia page is a good start, with many resources for many different software packages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRIB
A very popular tool is wgrib or wgrib2. Some information is given at https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/wesley/
Another tool are the Climate Data Operators cdo: https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo/. They use eccodes or parts of it to read GRIB. With cdo you can easily convert GRIB to other formats e.g. netCDF (though you must be careful and you should check – if possible!)
At DWD we use ECMWF’s ecCodes software to read GRIB. The link is https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/ECC/ecCodes+Home which also has references to WMO pages.
To work with GRIBs I recommend the grib_api-tools which are part of ecCodes.