Key facts and figures

An overview of who we are can be found in the Who we are section. Below, we offer a breakdown of some of the essential facts relating to our work (as of August 2023).

Background

Finance

  • The 35 Member and Co-operating States of ECMWF are the principal sources of finance for the Centre, with contributions totalling £54.7 million in 2022.
  • External organisations support both core research and the complementary goals of the Centre. In 2022, their funding totalled £43.8 million, while revenue from sales of data and products provided additional income of just under £12.9 million.

Forecasts

  • The term 'medium range' refers to time periods up to about 2 weeks ahead. Extended forecasts are also produced for monthly and seasonal timescales.
  • The weather services of our Member States receive ECMWF's numerical weather prediction data in real time – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • Forecasts are produced four times per day for weather services, commercial customers and research projects.
  • Commercial licences are held by customers in over 50 countries.
  • We use advanced computer modelling techniques to analyse observations and predict future weather.
  • We routinely process data from around 90 satellite instruments as part of our operational daily data assimilation and monitoring activities. We receive 800 million observations daily, and 60 million quality-controlled observations are available daily for use in the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS); the vast majority of these are satellite measurements, but we also benefit from all available observations from non-satellite sources, including surface-based and aircraft reports.
  • In summer 2023, we also started developing a machine learning model, the AIFS. This model is currently in its beta phase, and experimental runs are available on our charts pages.

Science and technology partnerships

  • We use the scientific advances made in areas such as data assimilation, Earth system modelling, predictability and reanalysis to improve our forecasts.
  • We have research partnerships with national meteorological services of the Member States and Co-operating States.
  • We also carry out a number of research projects coordinated and financed through the European Union, European space agencies and national funding sources.
  • We implement the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) on behalf of the European Commission.
  • ECMWF, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) are the three organisations entrusted by the EU to deliver the first phase of the EU's Destination Earth programme.

Computing

  • Our supercomputer facility is among the largest of its type in Europe.
  • Our Atos supercomputer has over one million processors spread across 4 clusters and a performance of about 30 petaflops (1015 or a million billion calculations per second).
  • Our supercomputer facility serves a variety of purposes, with 50% capacity used for research, 25% used by Member States and 25% used for production of operational forecasts.
  • The ECMWF meteorological data archive (MARS) is one of the largest in the world and continues to grow. As of August 2023, it contains around 450 petabytes of operational and research data, with about 300 terabytes being added daily. More than 550 billion meteorological fields are stored in MARS.

  • Read more about Supercomputing at ECMWF.