• How do I get the TIGGE data?

You can download the TIGGE data via one of the data portals hosted by either ECMWF or CMA, after a simple registration procedure. For further details, see the data access section of the tools page.

  • Why can't I download the most recent data?

Because of the data policy restricting the access to the TIGGE data with a delay of 48 hours after initial time of the forecasts (TIGGE data usage licence)

  • Why I cannot  get some data?

If there is a message in your data retrieval output about "damaged tape", it means that the data is currently not available. Normally a tape recovery process is ongoing in our data centre in such cases but  it can take  a long time  to resolve it. Also there is always a possibility that some data could not be recovered. For the exact list of  currently missing data because of  the damaged tapes, refer to the information in  MARS data unavailability in ECMWF tape library

  • Why is there missing a lot of cf/sfc data in the archive and as a consequence getting the continuous data for a longer period is difficult?

Recently (1s half of 2021) we have lost all cf/sfc (surface fields from control forecasts) data from all TIGGE centres for 710 dates in the past (2006-2019). At the moment we are trying to recover that data from TIGGE archive at CMA.  For the exact list of  currently missing data because of  the damaged tapes, refer to the information in  MARS data unavailability in ECMWF tape library

  • How can I use TIGGE  if I can't read GRIB2 format data?

Several tools are available to convert GRIB2 data to NETCDF, and also to use the data in either the original GRIB2 format or NETCDF - for more information, please see the links on the tools page.

  • How to retrieve daily total precipitation?

One could use Total precipitation archived to get daily total precipitation using forecast initialized at 00 UTC and selecting 24 hour step as shown in the request below:

Web API request 
#!/usr/bin/env python
from ecmwfapi import ECMWFDataServer
server = ECMWFDataServer()
server.retrieve({
    "class": "ti",
    "dataset": "tigge",
    "date": "2019-01-01/to/2019-01-31",
    "expver": "prod",
    "grid": "0.5/0.5",
    "levtype": "sfc",
    "origin": "ecmf",
    "param": "228228",
    "step": "24",
    "time": "00:00:00",
    "type": "fc",
    "target": "output",
})
  • What is the differences between Control Forecasts and Forecasts in your data portal?

The "forecast" means high-resolution forecast interpolated to TIGGE resolution  (type=fc in MARS). You can check which models do provide it for TIGGE in the page Models.  For some models the control forecast (cf) is the high-resolution product for TIGGE.