From 05th March 2024, ECMWF will allow Pre-Schedule Delivery for Member States, Co-operating States and users with the Gold Service Pack. 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, but the majority of files arrive into the system up to 45 minutes before this and are queued until the schedule.
With the pre-schedule option, the files will be sent as soon as the files are created and deposited into the ECPDS interface. This means files may arrive between 10-40 minutes before the schedule.
Pre-schedule delivery is available to Member States, Co-operating States and Gold Service Pack licence holders. Research users will not be eligible for pre-schedule delivery.
Datasets eligible for Pre-Schedule Delivery
All datasets within the HRES, ENS, WAVE and ENS-WAVE sets will be eligible for pre-schedule delivery. Pre-schedule will only be available for push 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
Support will not be provided for the following when opting to use the pre-schedule delivery:
- variability in file arrival times before the Dissemination Schedule
- files not received before the Dissemination Schedule has completed
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:
- Files may arrive non-consecutively: on occasion, step 4 might arrive before step 3. Your processing chain should be able to handle this and we will not be able to force consecutive files.
- Files might not be available before the schedule: in the event of delayed production, files may not be sent before the schedule.
- Files may be resent: if an issue occurs in the production of timesteps, we may need to send the file again. This may mean you receive a second copy, or the first copy might be corrupt/missing data.
Enabling Pre-Schedule Delivery
Temporarily, ECMWF Data Support team will enable your pre-schedule delivery option per feed.
Once stable, we will allow users to request pre-schedule delivery in the Product Requirements Editor.
Feed options will be updated to include 'normal', 'delay' and 'pre-schedule'.
Create a support ticket in our Support portal