ECMWF

Create ECMWF account

To be able to download data from ECMWF you first need to create an account with ECMWF. To do that go on the following site:

    https://www.ecmwf.int/user/login

Click on "Register" at the bottom. Fill the form and click on the big "Register" button at the end.

CDS API setup

Next you need to setup your CDS API personal access token. To do that follow the steps on the following page:

    https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/how-to-api

Log in to your account.

You need to follow the steps for the "Linux users". All you need to do is step 1.3. :

    "Once logged in, copy the code displayed below to the file $HOME/.cdsapirc".

You need to create this file in the home of any of our internal servers. If you do not see a long (more than 30 character) string with numbers, letters and dashes in the blackish box you are probably not logged in. You need to be logged in to see this string. Then just create the file $HOME/.cdsapirc and copy-paste the full content of the blackish box into it.

Step 2. is already done. See below how to use our already installed CDS API client.

Accept license

When you download data for the first time you will be asked to accept a license. You need to to this just once.

• If you want to download data online directly from the web site you will see a button "Accept License" or similar to accept the license at the end of the field selection page. Just click on it.
• If you want to download data with a Python script, the easiest way I found to accept the license is by starting(!) to download any field from the online web page. For example, from the following page:
      https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-single-levels?tab=download
  Log in, select any field, year, month, day, hour then scroll down to the end of the page. There, you should see a red button saying "Accept License" or similar. Just click on it. That's all. No need to submit the request! Then downloading data with Python should work.
  

Load environment

To be able to use our common CDF API client you need to load: