This year, the requirements freeze period will be between: Tuesday 19th December 2023 and Wednesday 3rd January 2024.
This means the last day for operational changes will be Tuesday 19th December 2023 at 15:00 GMT. Any changes after this will be made in January 2024 and will be done on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you have changes to either extended range or seasonal data, please keep in mind that these need to be installed the week prior to ensure delivery of updated data over the winter closure.
Operators will continue to monitor destinations under the Bronze, Silver and Gold packages during this time but will not be able to make host or configuration changes. This support will solely focus on broken data flows, missed files, etc.
We wish you all a great end of year.
From 01 December 2023, the upper limit of Volume Band 7 will increase from 1.5 TB per day to 3 TB per day with no additional cost for this band. Users in this band can take advantage of this from 01 December 2023. The hard system limit for data volumes is 8 TB per day.
In Q3 2024, ECMWF intends to implement a number of changes to the cost of data and the Service Charge model. This includes:
- decreasing the Maximum Charge licence cost from €70,000 per year to €47,500 per year
- decreasing the EPU from €0.25 to €0.15.
- revising the Services to include new features and change the pricing structure of the volume bands.
ECMWF will announce further details of this when they are confirmed.
In 2024, ECMWF will release the following as Open Data under the CC-BY-4 licence. This means these parameters will be free of Information Cost but may be subject to delivery charges if obtained via dissemination services such as ECPDS.
- The existing ECMWF Open Data will be increased to 0.25 degrees resolution (from 0.4 degrees).
- Additional parameters will be added to support the operation of Limited Area Modelling (LAM), including additional pressure levels.
- The entire ECMWF Real-time Catalogue at a resolution of 0.4 and coarser (0.4, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0, etc.) will be open and have no Information Cost.
- ECMWF will make available an extended range dataset to match the S2S dataset free of charge on the public FTP.
What does this mean for me?
ECMWF will announce the final date of implementation soon. From that point forward, new and renewing contracts can take advantage of these new open datasets. Users wishing to take advantage of this reduction sooner must provide 3 months' notice to terminate their licence agreement and re-sign a new contract. No contracts will be pro rata amended.