About this product
ECMWF HRES is the European Centre's operational deterministic forecast — the model forecasters call “the Euro”, and the one widely regarded as the world's most accurate. This site draws it at 0.1°, roughly 11 km, rather than the 0.25° open-data grid most public sites use: about seven times as many grid points, which is the difference between a smooth blob over the Alps and a forecast that knows where the valleys are.
Colours are the authentic ecCharts tables — the exact ECMWF Magics named colours in ecCharts palette order, on the published HRES level breaks, shaded as discrete bands rather than a smooth ramp. Reproducing that banding is most of what makes a chart read as ECMWF's rather than as a generic rainbow, and it is why the pointer reports a band — "15 to 25 mm" — instead of a false precision the chart never claimed. The colour-table menu in the map options can repaint any field in a different table when you want one; the ecCharts palette is what you get back by choosing Default.
One raster covers the planet, so every one of the 226 countries, twelve continental frames and eight ocean basins in the picker is a viewport on a field that is already drawn — which is why moving from Iceland to New Zealand is instant. That is affordable because each field is quantised to its own ecCharts band count rather than a flat 128 levels: a banded chart only ever claims which band a pixel is in, so the extra levels encoded noise nobody could read. Dropping them cut frames by about 70%, which is what pays for a global raster at native resolution. The ocean basins are in the picker because a global model earns its keep most over water, where there is nothing else to fall back on.
Steps are hourly to +90 hours, three-hourly to six days and six-hourly out to fifteen — the model's own cadence rather than an interpolation of it. Precipitation and snowfall accumulate over each step, so every frame states the interval it actually covers — 12 mm in one hour, in three and in six are very different forecasts, and the readout says which.
Compare & verify draws a second model over this one at the same valid time, or subtracts it. HRES against AIFS is the comparison worth having: the machine-learning forecast is drawn in identical colours on identical band breaks, so a swipe or a difference map shows where the two genuinely disagree rather than where two rendering pipelines do.
Click a city and its forecast opens as a meteogram: the field you are looking at as the headline, with temperature, dewpoint, rain as bars, wind, gust and pressure stacked under it on their own axes, and the same city from the two runs before this one drawn behind the headline — the run-to-run drift is most of what a point forecast has to say about its own confidence. Compare & verify offers those earlier runs too, as a swipe or a difference map at the same valid time, and reads both sides out at the pointer.
Prefer a chart viewer to a free map? The legacy view bolts the camera down: a fixed set of framings, the whole run decoded up front, and loops that step instantly because nothing has to be re-fetched.
Data © ECMWF. Forecast Euro is not affiliated with ECMWF.