Serving meteorology

By bringing together resources from across our Member and Co-operating States, we serve our community by providing world-leading weather forecasts, specialist software, and one of the largest meteorological data archives in the world.

An extensive educational programme facilitates scientific collaboration and equips users to make the most of ECMWF’s products.

We collaborate with the meteorological community at large, including the World Meteorological Organization, space agencies and academia around the world.

Member States

We work closely with our Member and Co-operating States to develop our modelling capabilities, design new products, and evaluate and diagnose forecast quality.

Areas of focus:

• Improving how we use observations and how they are processed
• Monitoring satellite data and using it in data assimilation
• Machine learning for numerical weather prediction
• Non-hydrostatic dynamical cores
• Physical process modelling
• Extended-range prediction
• Multi-model ensembles
• Atmospheric composition
• Verification methods for severe weather
• Reanalysis
• Predictability and sources of forecast error
• Earth-system modelling (atmosphere, land, ocean and cryosphere)
• Applications of weather forecasts in various sectors

We support researchers in the Member States in their wider use of ECMWF’s forecasts and resources, and strive to strengthen the already good collaboration with the academic community.

ECMWF is a key part of the European Meteorological Infrastructure (EUMETNET, EUMETSAT, ECMWF), which combines resources and capabilities to support national meteorological services with their official duties. With EUMETNET, the particular emphasis is on the EUCOS observing system, which we monitor and for which we carry out global observing system experiments. We seek synergies between our work on global reanalysis and the work at EUMETNET on regional reanalysis.

Short-range forecasts (for a few hours to a few days in the future) rely on very high-resolution limited‑area models run by the national meteorological services, often using boundary condition data from ECMWF. Through the SRNWP project, we support co-operation between organisations developing short-range numerical weather prediction models. Such models are mainly developed as co-operative projects under three large European consortia (ALADIN, HIRLAM and COSMO) and by the UK Met Office (as part of the Unified Model).

World Meteorological Organization (WMO)

Assisting the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of ECMWF’s founding objectives and holds an important place in the Centre’s current ten-year Strategy to 2025, with an explicit commitment to support training and capacity building in WMO Member States. This partnership ranges from providing essential data to WMO Members free of charge to supporting fellowships and projects to improve severe weather forecasting in developing countries.

ECMWF has had a formal co-operation agreement with the WMO since 1975.

Find out more about our work with the WMO.

Space agencies

Most of our information about the current weather now comes from satellites. Our long-standing partnerships with space agencies, especially with EUMETSAT and ESA, are crucial for us to benefit fully from satellite data. In return, we provide valuable feedback on the quality of the instruments and regular reports on their impact on global NWP. We have formal co-operation agreements with EUMETSAT, ESA, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), INPE and NOAA.

We also maintain strong scientific and technical co-operation with agencies in the United States (notably NASA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense) and Japan (JMA and JAXA).

Find out more about our work with space agencies and satellite data.

European Commission

ECMWF works with the European Commission in a variety of ways. Two major programmes we are involved in are the Copernicus Earth observation programme and Destination Earth.

In the Copernicus programme, we are implementing the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). We also contribute to the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) and work closely with the Copernicus Marine Environment Management Service (CMEMS).

Part of the European Commission’s Green Deal and the Digital Strategy, the Destination Earth initiative will initially comprise several digital twins of Earth. These separate twins will ultimately be joined together to form one comprehensive digital twin of the complete Earth system. ECMWF is a major partner in the programme, alongside ESA and EUMETSAT; our responsibility is for building the digital twin engine and the development of the first two digital twins – on weather-induced extremes and climate change adaptation – by 2024.

ECMWF receives funding from a number of EU funding programmes, including Horizon Europe, the Union Civil Protection Mechanism, the Connecting Europe Facility and EuroHPC. We currently co-ordinate the CoCO2 project, building a prototype system for a Copernicus CO₂ service, as well as CONFESS and MAELSTROM. We are co-ordinating the NextGEMS project with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M).

ECMWF is a partner in many more projects, which today constitute a significant proportion of the Centre's research activities.

We also have a co-operation agreement with the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission ().

Other organisations

We have formal co-operation agreements with a number of international organisations:

• African Centre for Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD)
• Executive Body of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP)
• National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil
• Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO)
• Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System for Africa and Asia (RIMES)
• United States National Weather Service (US NWS)
• Bureau of Meteorology, Australia
• Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)

We also co-operate with the International Research Institute (IRI) to make best use of the Centre’s seasonal predictions.

Climate science community

We work closely with European scientists studying climate change. The particular focus is climate reanalysis, which combines information from past meteorological observations with modern forecast models, using data assimilation techniques originally developed for numerical weather prediction. It is increasingly seen as critical to understanding the basis for future climate change scenarios.

Earth system models are currently the only way of providing society with information on the future climate. We collaborate with the EC-Earth consortium, which aims to develop a new Earth-system model. The goal is to build a fully coupled model (Atmosphere, Ocean, Land, Biosphere) for predicting the climate over seasons and decades and for climate projections. The proposed model builds on ECMWF's Integrated Forecasting System and aims to apply the emerging concept of “seamless prediction”.

Fellowship programme

The ECMWF Fellowship programme started in July 2014. It aims to foster and formalise links with individuals who are carrying out pioneering scientific and technical research in areas relevant to the strategic goals of ECMWF.

Key points

• Fellows are appointed by the ECMWF Directorate.
• Total number of Fellows is expected to be around 10 when the programme is fully established.
• Fellowships are for three years, with the possibility of being renewed once for another three years.
• Fellows are encouraged to provide regular, short reports of the key results of their work, for publication on ECMWF’s website and in other relevant publications.
• Fellows have access to ECMWF computing facilities and databases, and to a limited amount of annual funding for visits to the Centre to share the results of their research work.

National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs)