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Because ecFlow was designed with ECMWF suites in mind, the date is a very important notion.
ecFlow defines time using clocks. A clock is an attribute of a suite.
Different suites can have different clocks.
There are two kinds of clocks:
A suite clock can be modified by a gain. This is useful for suites running on older data (e.g. cleaning up old data).
The value of the date is in the generated variable ECF_DATE, and the value of the time is in ECF_TIME.
ECF_CLOCK contains other information such as the day of the week.
It is safer for a job to always use the suite generated time and date variable‘s,
and not access directly the system date to prevent confusion.

What to do

  1. Try to modify the suite to run with a clock date from the previous week. 
     use :ecflow_client --alter change clock_date <day>.<month>.<year>  /test
     i.e.    ecflow_client --alter change clock_date 1.4.2020   /test
  2. Check the values of the ecFlow variable‘s
  3. Set the suite clock to sync  with the computer
      ecflow_client --alter change clock_sync   /test
      Check with:
      ecflow_client --get /test | grep clock


  • Be aware that cron with a single time dependency will automatically resubmit indefinitely
  • Altering the clock requires that the suite is re-queued