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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.

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