Scope of support

• Member and Co-operating State users: ECMWF will prioritise its Member and Co-operating State users in its responses. 
• Service Agreement Users: Support is available only to users with an active Service Agreement. 
• Fee-waiver scheme users: Users who receive data for Research Purposes or via a Fee Waiver Service Agreement will not be eligible for 24/7 support, and responses will be handled on a best endeavours basis.

• Free and open data: ECMWF provides best endeavours support for free and open products, including IFS/AIFS open data, free open charts, and other unrestricted services. Support is limited to ECMWF software-related bugs and GRIB encoding issues. 

Support coverage

• ECMWF Office Hours are Monday-Friday 08 - 18:00 UTC (excl. public and official holidays)
• Outside ECMWF Office Hours, our team of operators are available to assist for critical operational issues

• 24/7 support is strictly limited to critical operational issues, such as:

  • Broken data flows or dissemination failures

  • Corrupted GRIB files

  • Model production failures

• 24/7 support does not extend to:

  • Contractual or administrative issues

  • Scientific questions or methodological discussions

  • Requests for addition/removal of parameters or datasets to current operational data flows
  • Test data or Release Candidate Phase data (e.g. 50r1)

Response times

ECMWF will always endeavour to help users as quickly as possible, but due to large volumes of requests and the operational production nature, we may not be able to immediately implement a fix or change to the system. 

• Urgent issues: ECMWF endeavours to respond within 12-24 hours. In the event of a bug or production issue, these may require intervention from the operational and development teams, and these can take longer depending on severity.  

• Service Agreement renewals: typically take up to 2 weeks to process.
• Changes to data requirements by Data Support can typically take up to 2 weeks to implement, depending on the complexity. We encourage users to plan ahead, as we may not be able to implement business-critical changes on your timescale. 

• Scientific questions: Responses may take 2–4 weeks, depending on complexity and staff availability.

Support channels

• All requests by licensed users should be submitted via the ECMWF Support Portal wherever possible.

• Open data users are encouraged to seek advice from our community Forum and User Documentation. 

• Direct emails may be ignored if not routed through the correct channel.

• ECMWF will not provide support through social media platforms.

Exclusions

• ECMWF will not support the downstream users of its customers.

• ECMWF will not provide consultancy or bespoke services outside the agreed contractual framework.

• Changes to data requirements made by licensed users outside of office hours are taken at the user's risk and ECMWF support staff can only offer to revert the changes outside of ECMWF Office Hours. Regeneration of data, if possible or applicable, may be undertaken during office hours at Data Support discretion.