The NMHS non-commercial licence

A new service for WMO Members

In 2009 the ECMWF Council approved a new type of licence specifically designed for non-commercial use by the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services of WMO Members.

For a total annual fee of 42,000 EUR, the NMHS will have access to an extensive range of ECMWF products as well as access to the ECMWF archive, for fulfilling national governmental obligations related to the protection of life and property and for research projects and educational use.

Services provided

Realtime data

ECMWF operates a comprehensive forecasting system providing weather predictions up to 15 days in the future. It comprises a high quality 4-dimensional variational data assimilation system (4D-Var), the high resolution global model, the 51 member Ensemble Prediction System (EPS), ocean wave and ocean circulation models. Once a week the EPS is extended to 30 days to provide a forecast for the month ahead. Satellite and in situ observations of atmospheric, soil and ocean conditions provide the essential input to establish the initial conditions of the earth-atmosphere system. Performance statistics are available here.

Additionaly ECMWF runs seasonal forecasts out to six months in the future that are produced with a coupled ocean-atmosphere model and a separate ocean analysis system to initiate the seasonal forecasts.

The service provided under this licence includes access to any products from the Catalogue of ECMWF Real-Time Products. The catalogue covers a very wide spectrum of parameters, levels and ranges from the various ECMWF forecasting systems at full resolution. The service allows the creation of tailored products by changing the grid resolution and geographical area. Products are pushed directly to the user's machine by FTP over the Internet according to a schedule.

Web charts

The ECMWF website offers a unique set of charts, graphs and tools to use in daily forecasting work. This includes charts of weather parameters including cloud cover, precipitation and mean sea level pressure and EPS probabilities for various parameters. The extreme forecast index (EFI) provides an 'alarm bell' for potential extreme weather events; forecasters can use the interactive EFI web chart to find more details of the forecast temperature, wind and precipitation at any location. A tool is also available to generate your own EPSGrams: a graph summarising the evolution of the EPS distribution of wind, temperature, cloud and precipitation at user-specified locations during the 15 days of the forecast. Charts are also provided for the monthly and seasonal forecasts.

The service provided under this licence includes a web login allowing access to the ECMWF web products.

Archive data

The ECMWF Meteorological Archive (MARS) is the main repository of meteorological data at ECMWF. Weather forecasting makes use of and generates very large volumes of data that need to be stored for long periods. This includes observations, analyses, forecasts, climate reanalyses and research experiments. ECMWF has now accumulated over 10 Petabytes of meteorological data. This data represent a valuable asset, providing a detailed record of world-wide weather over the past 50 years and weather forecasts used by researchers in meteorological and environmental studies around the world.

The service provided under this licence includes access to the MARS archive. Access is given by the means of a dedicated software which allows secure remote access to the archive. Such access is subject to a yearly limit in terms of data volumes.

Ordering

Tariffs

The annual fee for the NMHS non-commercial licence consists of the following elements:

• An information charge of 14.000 EUR that covers the cost of the data (Only 10% of the 140.000 EUR applied for commercial use)
• A handling charge of 28.000 EUR that covers the product generation and delivery of up to 75 gigabytes of daily data, as well as the support.

Conditions

Under a NMHS non commercial licence, the customer can use the data received for the following activities only:

• For fulfilling national governmental obligations related to the protection of life and property.
• For Research Projects and Educational Use, provided that any such activity is carried out strictly on a non-commercial basis.
• Access to the ECMWF archive products is granted only for the purpose of improving the real-time products received via the ECMWF product delivery system.
• No redistribution of the data in digital format is allowed.

For full terms and conditions, please refer to the actual licence template

Contact

The main contact point for the NMHS non-commercial licence at ECMWF is the Data Services Team; they will guide you through the ordering procedure and provide support during the entire duration of the licence agreement. The ECMWF Calldesk provides support 24 hours per day 7 days per week to registered users.

To obtain further information or to arrange for a trial access, please contact the Data Services Team by email.