ECMWF allows Pre-Schedule Delivery for Member States, Co-operating States and users with specific service packages (see page Service Charges: From 01 July 2024 for users with a Service Agreement).  To request the addition of this feature, please raise a ticket in the ECMWF Support Portal and mark it for the attention of the Data Support Team. 

What is Pre-Schedule Delivery?

ECMWF delivers files according to the dissemination schedule, in the standard delivery mode, even when files are produced earlier and already available in the ECPDS interface, they remain queued until their scheduled release time.

With the pre-schedule option, the files are sent as soon as they are created and made available into the ECPDS interface. This means that IFS files may arrive between 10 and 120 minutes before the dissemination schedule. In the case of ENS Subseasonal, the data may arrive much earlier, around 7 hours before the scheduled delivery. For AIFS data, files may arrive between 30 and 140 minutes before the schedule, starting at a similar time to IFS pre-schedule step 0.

The timestamp for the creation of files may vary day-by-day and there may be some larger or smaller gaps between steps.  

Files will not be sent until they are available for all users.

Pre-schedule delivery is available to Member States, Co-operating States, Gold Service Pack Service Agreement holders, and Silver Service Pack Service Agreement holders. Research users will not be eligible for pre-schedule delivery.

Datasets eligible for Pre-Schedule Delivery

  • AIFS Single and AIFS Ensemble datasets are eligible.
  • All datasets within the HRES, ENS, ENS Subseasonal, WAVE and ENS-WAVE sets are eligible for pre-schedule delivery. Note that hindcast is not available for pre-schedule delivery.
  • Pre-schedule delivery is available for both push and pull ECPDS destinations. 
  • Post-processed products require all steps to be completed prior to sending. 

Where feeds contain a mixture of datasets, those that are not eligible will not be delivered ahead of the schedule.

Support for Pre-Schedule Delivery 

Users will be notified of operational issues as per the current arrangement.

Users with pre-schedule delivery should not raise tickets until at least 15 minutes past the Dissemination Schedule and where no operational issues have been reported. 

Before reporting issues, we encourage users to check the status of files in ECPDS and also the ECMWF Service Status.  

Please note that support will not be provided for variability in file arrival times, but users should continue to report perceived traffic slowdowns. 

24/7 support will not include changing the status of feeds from 'normal' to 'pre-schedule'. This will be enabled during office hours Monday-Thursday by Data Support team. 

There are a number of risks to be aware of when using the Pre-schedule Delivery option: 

  1. There is a higher risk that files may need to be re-generated. If issues are discovered during the generation process before the scheduled delivery, you may initially receive corrupted or incomplete files. Corrected versions will be sent after the scheduled time, which increases the risk of processing files that will later need to be replaced.
  2. Files may arrive non-consecutively:  on occasion the steps may arrive out of order (for example: step 4 may arrive before step 3). Your processing chain should be able to handle this and we will not be able to force consecutive files for pre-schedule delivery. 
  3. Files might not be available before the schedule: in the event of delayed production, files may not be sent before the schedule. 
  4. File priorities can interfere with the delivery: the default priorities of files can interfere with the delivery order, particularly for hourly steps of the 00/12 UTC runs. If your hourly steps have priority=70, these might be delivered after the enfo data streams, which have a default priority of 40. Priorities can be set in the Product Requirements Editor by using priority= 

Enabling Pre-Schedule Delivery

Users can request pre-schedule delivery in the Product Requirements Editor. 

Feed options include DELAY, NORMAL and PRE-SCHEDULE. 

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GET HELP

Create a support ticket in our Support portal

Difficulty with ECMWF Data

Want to find a solution from the community? Check out the ECMWF Forum.


Please note that support for this service option will be handled only after the dissemination schedule has concluded. 


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Typical pre-schedule lead time

Median over the last 10 days of how many minutes before the dissemination schedule each run's first data starts transferring to users, a positive value means data arrives that many minutes early. Each cell also shows the step-0 scheduled release time (sched) and the typical earliest arrival. A dash (-) means the run doesn't run at that cycle.

Full Name (Model Name)
class:stream:type		00z06z12z18z
IFS Medium-range Control Forecast (ifs-ens-cf)
od:oper:fc		21 min
sched 05:45z → arrives 05:24z		20 min
sched 11:45z → arrives 11:25z		23 min
sched 17:45z → arrives 17:22z		22 min
sched 23:45z → arrives 23:23z
IFS Medium-range Ensemble Forecast (ifs-ens)
od:enfo:pf		44 min
sched 06:40z → arrives 05:56z		49 min
sched 12:40z → arrives 11:51z		50 min
sched 18:40z → arrives 17:50z		48 min
sched 00:40z → arrives 23:52z
IFS Sub-seasonal Forecast (ifs-subs)
od:eefo:cf		7h 44m
sched 20:00z → arrives 12:16z		---
AIFS Single Forecast (aifs-single)
ai:oper:fc		23 min
sched 05:45z → arrives 05:22z		64 min
sched 12:27z → arrives 11:23z		22 min
sched 17:45z → arrives 17:23z		64 min
sched 00:27z → arrives 23:23z
AIFS Ensemble Forecast (aifs-ens)
ai:enfo:cf		51 min
sched 06:40z → arrives 05:49z		51 min
sched 12:40z → arrives 11:49z		56 min
sched 18:40z → arrives 17:44z		53 min
sched 00:40z → arrives 23:47z
IFS Atmospheric Composition Forecast (ifs-compo)
mc:oper:fc		47 min
sched 10:00z → arrives 09:13z		-46 min
sched 22:00z → arrives 21:14z		-

Generated 2026-08-03 17:43 UTC. Updated weekly.

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