OpenIFS

The OpenIFS project at ECMWF provides a version of the ECMWF IFS model for use at institutes and universities, for research and education. See 'About OpenIFS' for more information.

A licence is required, the model codes are not provided as open-source The licence is free and available as a site license to support research and education use. No personal licenses are provided. No commercial licensing is provided.

Register your interest

The first step to obtaining a licence for OpenIFS is to register your interest. All institutes & universities may apply.

Requests and queries can be sent to: openifs-support@ecmwf.int.

This will be sent to the OpenIFS team who will review the request and respond as soon as possible. ECMWF will review the request to ensure the proposed use is appropriate for the model. OpenIFS support is limited and ECMWF may refuse license requests if the total number of licenses exceeds our support capacity. Preference may be given to ECMWF member states and new or existing collaborations.

License

OpenIFS is provided free to institutes (e.g. universities) for educational and research use (only) but it is not open source nor public domain software and we do not provide personal licenses.

Licensing of OpenIFS should not be seen as a barrier to use of the model. Please contact openifs-support@ecmwf.int for any queries.

See OpenIFS Licensing for more details about the licence terms.

Release files

The OpenIFS model is available as tarfiles from an ECMWF download site along with example initial experiment data and additional software.

In order to access the download site prospective model users need to:

  (1) be affiliated with an institution that has signed the OpenIFS licence agreement,
  (2) have created their own personal ECMWF web user account,
  (3) and contact OpenIFS support to have this account added to the OpenIFS user group. 

OpenIFS is also available as a Git repository for selected developers and users. For more details please contact: openifs-support@ecmwf.int.

Getting started

For instructions on downloading and installing OpenIFS please see: OpenIFS User Guides.




We ask interested users to send a short description of their intended use of the model.

Our aim is to work closely with new users to provide good support & training in return for feedback which we can use for reporting purposes. This may mean that from time to time we temporarily suspend new licenses in order not to overload our support capabilities.