Model Explorer
Live ECMWF · ICON · GFS · GEM · FOUR CENTRES OVER ONE CONTINENTThe four models
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
The most skilful global deterministic model by most scores, and the one the others are measured against — drawn at 0.1°, about 11 km, rather than the 0.25° open-data grid most public sites show.
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Deutscher Wetterdienst
Germany's icosahedral global model — a grid with no poles and no seams, equally fine everywhere, which over a continent that straddles the equator is worth more than it sounds. Upper air too: 500 hPa heights, 850 hPa temperature and the jet.
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NOAA / NCEP
The American global model — public domain, four cycles a day, and the guidance most national services on this continent actually run on.
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Environment and Climate Change Canada
The Canadian global model, rendered worldwide rather than cropped to North America — which is the only reason a Canadian model reaches this continent.
RENDERED BY FORECASTCANADA.COM
How to read this page
Four centres, one instrument. This is the explorer Forecast Euro, Forecast Eagle and Forecast Canada run, pointed at the four global models that cover this continent. Each model is its own address — /ecmwf, /icon, /gfs, /gem — and the chips at the top carry the place and the field across, so flipping models keeps you looking at the same country and the same quantity. There is no high-resolution national model over almost any of Africa, so the global guidance is the forecast here, and the disagreement between four centres is the forecast uncertainty made visible.
Compare & verify, in the map options, draws a second model over this one at the same valid time — never the same forecast hour, since the four run on different cycles — as a swipe at a meridian you drag, or as a difference map, A − B, on a diverging scale. The four publish in three unit systems (GFS in °F, mph and inches), so the second model is converted onto the first before anything is subtracted, and rain is only differenced when both frames cover the same interval. Earlier runs of the same model are partners too: that is run-to-run drift, the cheapest confidence measure there is.
One unit system for every number. The toggle at the top puts the legend, the pointer, the city values and the meteogram in metric or imperial whichever centre drew the picture. The picture is not re-rendered — only the scale it is read against changes.
Click a city on ECMWF or ICON and its forecast opens as a meteogram: the field on screen as the headline, with temperature, dewpoint, rain, wind, gust and pressure stacked under it, and the two runs before this one drawn behind. GFS and GEM are sampled by their rendering sites at American and Canadian cities only, so on those two the city values are read back out of the picture and the meteogram is not offered.
Colour tables. Each field opens in its centre's own palette — ecCharts on ECMWF and ICON, the network's tables on GFS and GEM. The colour-table menu repaints it in any table that fits the field's units, Ryan Maue's GrADS tables first, and the pointer and the labels follow the new table.
Nothing on this page is rendered here. The frames come from the object stores the rendering sites publish to — forecasteuro.com, forecastgermany.com, forecasteagle.com and forecastcanada.com — proxied under this domain. Data © ECMWF, DWD, NOAA and ECCC.