CMA re-forecast efficient retrieval

To help users to improve S2S CMA MARS requests performance via the WebAPI.

A good understanding of the MARS efficiency issues is essential especially for users that are interested in downloading large amounts of data.

In general it is organised, as a huge tree, with the indentation below, showing different levels down that tree:

• centre (CMA, ECMWF, NCEP, JMA, ...)
  • realtime or reforecast
    •  type of data (control forecast or perturbed forecast)
      • type of level (single level or pressure level or potential  temperature)
        • model version date (2014-05-01 or ...)
          
          • hindcast dates (2014-01-01 or 2014-01-02 or 2014-01-03, ...)
            •  time-steps
              • members (for perturbed forecast)
                • levels (for pl or pt)
                  • parameters

The idea is to request as much data as possible from the same tape file. The natural way to group requests would be:
all parameters, all levels, all members, all time-steps for 1 hindcast date for a type of level for a type

Note the following:

1. 'all' means 'all' that the user wants. It doesn't have to be all parameters.
2. If a user is interested only on z500,  he may request more hindcast dates in one go, since the overall request will not be so big.

The best approach is to iterate over the hindcastYears. For each hindcastYear iterate over all the available hindcastMonths and for each hindcastMonth iterate over all the available hindcastDays.

At this point you may wish to check CMA availability and to view a CMA request

for hindcastYear in hindcastYears
    for hindcastMonth in hindcastMonths        
        for hindcastDay in hindcastDays             
            hindcastDate = HindcastYear-hindcastMonth-hindcastDay               
                S2S-request(hindcastDate)

• The objective of this example is to demonstrate how to iterate efficiently over all the available hindcastYears, hindcastMonths and hindcastDays for a CMA reforecast request
• It can be used as a starting point, however you need to keep in mind that you have to adapt it to your needs eg to set the keyword values according to your requirements ("param", "levtype", "step" etc).
• In this way you can extend this request to download the whole S2S CMA reforecast. Don't forget to check CMA availability

 Please note:

• set the variable "target"  to write each hindcastDate on a separate file .
• taking under consideration your request's size (eg nr of fields and volume)  you can merge several hindcastDates on the same "target"
  

• CMA re-forecast requests
• ECMWF Web API Home
• CMA re-forecast availability
• A brief description of reforecasts