Data Structure and Formats

This section documents and provides learning resources about the different CEMS-Flood data formats and structures.

CEMS-Flood data are available in two formats: GRIB2 and NetCDF4.  

GRIB2, the format in which the data is stored in the MARS archive, is the official supported format.

NetCDF4 is also supported for the datasets (see Table 1).

CEMS-Flood has two services for different spatial domains, EFAS (for Europe) and GloFAS (for the world), each consisting of: 

• 5 model outputs: Historical, Forecast, Reforecast, Seasonal Forecast, and Seasonal Reforecast. 
• Auxiliary datasets

Note that each dataset can differ in structure and format supported, more information can be found in the GRIB2 and NetCDF4 sections.

A comprehensive summary is outlined in the table below.

Table 1 - Available data formats by data access service. The auxiliary files are indicated in green.

Table 2 - Information on EFAS and GloFAS grids