ERA5¶

Global atmospheric reanalysis produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), providing high-resolution meteorological fields for weather, climate, and hazard-related applications.

Overview¶

ERA5 is the fifth-generation global reanalysis developed by ECMWF under the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). It combines vast amounts of historical observations with a modern data assimilation system to generate temporally consistent, high-resolution estimates of the atmospheric state.

ERA5 is widely adopted as a standard meteorological baseline for climate studies and natural hazard modeling, including wildfire danger assessment, flood risk analysis, and extreme weather attribution.

Data Characteristics¶

Spatial coverage: Global
Spatial resolution: ~0.25° latitude × 0.25° longitude
Temporal resolution: Hourly
Vertical structure: Single-level fields and optional pressure/model levels
Data format: GRIB and NetCDF
Coordinate system: Regular latitude–longitude grid

Variables¶

ERA5 provides a comprehensive set of atmospheric and surface variables, including:

Near-surface meteorology (2 m temperature, dewpoint, wind)
Precipitation, radiation, and surface fluxes
Atmospheric pressure-level variables (temperature, winds, geopotential)
Boundary-layer and land-surface diagnostics

Typical Use Cases¶

Meteorological forcing for wildfire, flood, and extreme weather prediction models
Climate variability and trend analysis
Environmental covariates for spatiotemporal machine learning tasks
Benchmark reanalysis input for weather–climate modeling pipelines

Access¶

ERA5 data are distributed via the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS):

Reference¶

Hersbach, H., Bell, B., Berrisford, P., et al. (2020). The ERA5 global reanalysis. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 146(730), 1999–2049. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803