Downloading ERA5 Data

ERA5 (and ERA5-Land) data can be downloaded manually from the Copernicus Data Store (CDS) or automatically via the CDS api, as done in the download module (era5_download). Before you can use this, you have to set up an account at the CDS and setup the CDS key.

Then you can use the program era5_download to download ERA5 images between a passed start and end date. era5_download --help will show additional information on using the command.

For example, the following command in your terminal would download ERA5 images for all available layers of soil moisture in netcdf format, between January 1st and February 1st 2000 in grib format into /path/to/storage. The data will be stored in subfolders of the format YYYY/jjj. The temporal resolution of the images is 6 hours by default.

era5_download /path/to/storage -s 2000-01-01 -e 2000-02-01 --variables swvl1 swvl2 swvl3 swvl4

The names of the variables to download can be its long names, the short names (as in the example) or the parameter IDs. We use the era5_lut.csv file to look up the right name for the CDS API. Other flags, that can be activated in era5_download are:

  • -h (–help) : shows the help text for the download function

  • -p (–product): specify the ERA5 product to download. Choose either ERA5 or ERA5-Land. Default is ERA5.

  • -keep (–keep_original) : keeps the originally downloaded files as well. We split the downloaded, monthly stacks into single images and discard the original files by default.

  • -grb (–as_grib)download the data in grib format instead of the default nc4

    format (grib reading is not supported on Windows OS).

  • –h_steps : full hours for which images are downloaded (e.g. –h_steps 0 would download only data at 00:00 UTC). By default we use 0, 6, 12 and 18.

Downloading ERA Interim Data

ERA-Interim has been decommissioned. Use ERA5 instead.

ERA-Interim data can be downloaded manually from the ECMWF servers. It can also be done automatically using the ECMWF API. To use the ECMWF API you have to be registered, install the ecmwf-api Python package and setup the ECMWF API Key. A guide for this is provided by ECMWF.

After that you can use the command line program eraint_download to download images with a temporal resoltuion of 6 hours between a passed start and end date. eraint_download --help will show additional information on using the command.

For example, the following command in your terminal would download ERA Interim soil moisture images of all available layers (see the Variable DB) in netcdf format on the default gaussian grid for ERA-Interim (0.75°x0.75°) into the folder /path/to/storage between January 1st and February 1st 2000. The data will be stored in subfolders of the format YYYY/jjj, where YYYY describes the year and jjj the day of the year for the downloaded files.

eraint_download /path/to/storage  -s 2000-01-01 -e 2000-02-01 --variables swvl1 swvl2 swvl3 swvl4

Additional optional parameters allow downloading images in netcdf format, and in a different spatial resolution (see the –help function and descriptions for downloading ERA5 data)