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Demonstration (part 1): ERA5 and where to find it
Meet ERA5 - the world's most widely used atmospheric reanalysis - and see where and how to access it.
Having covered why atmospheric data matters, Ebenezer Nyadjro now turns to how to get it – beginning with the dataset you’ll meet most often: ERA5.
This short introduction sets up the live demonstration that follows:
- What ERA5 is – the fifth-generation reanalysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). It’s well-formatted, corrected, and built on the lessons of earlier reanalyses
- Why it’s so widely used – it provides global atmospheric analysis (not just a single region), at high resolution in both space and time, making it suitable for a huge range of ocean-forecasting applications
- Where to get it – the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS), the open-access portal the demonstration will navigate
- What the demonstration will show – how to find the data, select variables, choose the region and time period of interest, pick an output format, and inspect what you’ve downloaded before using it
- The data format – NetCDF (Network Common Data Form), one of the most common formats for environmental data, and how to check its metadata
With ERA5 and the CDS introduced, the next part is the live walkthrough itself.
