ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Forecasts - Anomalous Precipitation

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) SEAS5 ensemble model produces monthly precipitation anomaly forecasts in mm/month. Data is available on the 5th of each month with up to 6 months of lead time and has been aggregated across administrative boundaries at admin 0 and admin 1 levels. Resources include historical CSV records for admin 0 and admin 1, as well as GeoTIFF files based on the latest forecast.

Use Cases

• Assessing seasonal flood or drought risk based on forecasted precipitation anomalies.
• Comparing forecasted precipitation deviations from long-term averages for specific administrative regions.
• Integrating probabilistic ensemble forecast outputs into regional climate adaptation models.
• Visualizing global precipitation anomaly patterns using the aggregated GeoTIFF files.

Strengths

• Data is produced by the authoritative European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
• Forecasts are updated monthly on the 5th with a lead time of up to 6 months.
• Postprocessing aggregates the gridded model outputs to administrative boundaries (admin 0 and admin 1), simplifying regional analysis.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) SEAS5 model.

Collection Method

Ensemble forecast model outputs averaged (ensemble mean) and postprocessed to aggregate across administrative boundaries.

Freshness

Data is updated monthly; last metadata update was 2026-05-07 10:57:31.110057.

Geography

Global, aggregated at country (admin 0) and sub-national (admin 1) levels.