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MARS, the ECMWF archive
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The Meteorological Archival and Retrieval System (MARS) is the main repository of meteorological data at ECMWF. It contains terabytes of operational and research data as well as data from special projects.
MARS data is freely available to registered users in the Member States and Co-operating States.
There is no public access to MARS. For research and commercial use, data can be obtained through our Data Services. For research use only, some datasets are freely available on our Data Server.
Overview
This (static) page tries to give a high level overview of the content of the MARS archive,Catalogue
The web pages that you will find there are dynamically build as you browse them, from the content of the MARS metadata databases. This catalogue represents the exact state of the MARS archive. Every one of the billions of meteorological fields can be reached and retrieved from there.
Support for observations is not yet available.
Data Finder
Because the catalogue above is organized according to the content of the MARS metadata databases, its structure may not be suitable for quickly find information such as "When were ozone fields first introduced in MARS?" . The Data Finder tries to solve this problem by fully indexing the operational part of the archive and allow you navigate this index in various ways.
The Data Finder database is only updated two days after the archive.
Last Update
Every night, the output of all ECMWF operational models is archived as soon as it is created. At the end of the archive process, a set of web pages is automatically created that describe what meteorological fields have been added to MARS.Parameter database
This view on the MARS content is based on GRIB tables, e.g. on one page you can see which meteorological parameters in GRIB table 128 are archived in MARS and sort them by their GRIB code or MARS abbreviation. By following the links you can also find further information on the computation of individual parameters in our model.Changes in the archive
These pages describe the changes in the archive, such as the addition or discontinuation of fields, as well as missing data.
Server Activity
The MARS system is serving tens of thousands of requests daily. The duration of a retrieval depends on the number of concurrent requests the system is currently processing, the amount of data retrieved as well as the number of tape mounts involved. You can monitor the progress of your requests from this page.
Documentation
These pages contain information about the MARS system and the MARS request language.
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30.01.2007 |
mars@ecmwf.int |
© ECMWF |
