Licences: what we may manipulate

Kept by incident.meteorology@web-summit.dinis, 11 November 2026, 11:36 UTC

Where a forecast comes from · as data

Dinis: "the licence of all these is very important: there's data that we can manipulate and data that we can't." One row per source. Four plain answers; unclear where the terms are silent or we have not read them. Each licence name links to the page that states it; "Checked" says whether the words we quote were on that page when our reader fetched it. A careful reading of public terms by an agent, not legal advice: a doubtful case is Dinis's decision.

Sources in the chain, most free first

The conditions, and the words we found

• NOAA / US National Weather Service (GFS, NOMADS, Aviation Weather Center, NHC): Do not present modified data as official NWS information. On the page: "Centers Use of NOAA/NWS Data and Products The information on National Weather Service (NWS) Web pages are in the public domain, unless specifically noted otherwise, and may be used without charge for any lawful purpose so long as you do not: 1) claim it is you" Covers: GFS (NOAA/NCEP), NOAA NOMADS (NCEP model output), NOAA Aviation Weather Center data API, US National Hurricane Center, GOES (geostationary, Americas), JPSS and NOAA polar orbiters.
• ECMWF open data (IFS and AIFS real-time forecasts): No service guarantee; the open subset is coarser (0.25°) and later than what members receive. On the page: "and AIFS models is made available to the public free of charge. Their use is governed by the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 licence and the ECMWF Terms of Use . This means that the data may be redistributed and used commercially, subject to appropriate attribution" Covers: ECMWF open data, ECMWF IFS, ECMWF AIFS.
• ECMWF AIFS (the trained model itself): Running it needs the IFS analysis as input (also open data) and a GPU. On the page: "aifs-single-1.0 Like 53 Follow ECMWF 173 Graph Machine Learning AnemoI English doi:10.57967/hf/4629 arxiv: 2406.01465 License: cc-by-4.0 Model card Files Files and versions xet Community 9 Deploy Copy to bucket Use this model Instructions to use ecmwf/aifs-sin" Covers: ECMWF AIFS.
• Deutscher Wetterdienst (ICON and the open data server): Content marked as third-party is excluded. On the page: "copyright and related rights. Re-use is permitted solely under the terms of the Creative Commons license BY 4.0 ( CC BY 4.0 ) providing the source is duly acknowledged. Content that is subject to third-party rights is marked as such. For using such content, it" Covers: DWD open data server, ICON (DWD).
• MET Norway (api.met.no, Locationforecast): Terms of service: an identifying User-Agent, caching, no more than 20 requests a second; outside the Nordic area the forecast is ECMWF's. On the page: "User-Agent header! Licensing and Data Policy Unless specified otherwise, all data and products are licensed under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD) 2.0 and Creative Commons 4.0 BY International licences. Credit should be given to The Norweg" Covers: MET Norway weather API (api.met.no), MEPS (MetCoOp), Yr (MET Norway and NRK).
• Open-Meteo (API data): Free API: non-commercial only, fewer than 10,000 calls a day (its terms page). A newsroom that sells advertising or subscriptions should use the paid plan or the models' own open data. On the page: "Licence ) Location database from GeoNames ( CC-BY Licence ) Icons from Weather Icons ( SIL OFL 1.1 ) Licence API data are offered under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) You are free to share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format " Covers: Open-Meteo.
• IPMA open data (api.ipma.pt): The terms speak of using the information, not of storing or changing it: silent on both, so "unclear". No profit-making purpose. The full reading is incident.ipma@'s (sources/ipma/). On the page: "símbolos nacionais existentes neste site para uso pessoal ou público desde que dessa utilização não decorram finalidades lucrativas ou ofensivas . O Utilizador deve referir, sempre, a fonte de informação . No que respeita aos sítios para que este site faz liga" Covers: IPMA open data (api.ipma.pt), IPMA's surface stations, IPMA's weather warnings (avisos meteorológicos).
• MeteoAlarm feeds: Real time (under five minutes on average) only if "operationally redistributed": that our dated record is not operational redistribution is incident.sources@'s reading, a hypothesis. The site's own content (map, icons, layout) is not licensed to us. The one statement is incident.sources@'s, read on MeteoAlarm's terms page at 02:15 UTC on 11 November: sources/meteoalarm/source.json → licence. This row summarises it and is checked against that file. On the page: "redistribution", "as_published": "All Information on the MeteoAlarm Website may be used and redistributed under terms equivalent to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), along with the following additional requirements", "requ" Covers: MeteoAlarm, MeteoAlarm feeds.
• Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5): A reanalysis: it lags real time by about five days, so it will show Charles only afterwards. On the page: "present\".","url":"(link)" Covers: ERA5 (Copernicus Climate Change Service).
• Copernicus Marine Service: The licence text itself is a linked document not yet read: transform is "unclear" until it is. On the page: "environment for the ultimate benefit of all European and global citizens. Copernicus Marine Service Provides free, open, regular and systematic reference information on the blue (physical), white (sea ice), and green (biogeochemical) ocean state, variability a" Covers: Copernicus Marine Service, IBI wave analysis and forecast (Copernicus Marine).
• Météo-France open data (ARPEGE, AROME, observations): The sentence read is the portal's default ("unless stated otherwise"); each Météo-France data set states its own licence, still to be read one by one. On the page: ": partiellement conforme Sauf indication contraire, tout le contenu de ce site est disponible sous la licence Open Licence 2.0" Covers: Météo-France open data, ARPEGE (Météo-France), AROME (Météo-France).
• AEMET (Spain): Its notice forbids distorting the meaning and asks that changed information not be attributed to AEMET. On the page: "Statistics Virtual office Homepage Legal notice Legal Notice normalize-space(pagina/entradilla) != '' --> Use and reuse --> normalize-space(./texto/parrafo_con_… != '' and normalize-space(./imagen/nombre_imag… = '' --> --> The information obtained and elaborat" Covers: AEMET, AEMET Meteoalerta, HARMONIE-AROME (AEMET and the ACCORD consortium).
• Met Office (UK): The model data through Weather DataHub needs a key and has its own terms: not read. On the page: "Policy provides further information on the categorisation of our data. Met Office Open Data Policy Free Licences Open Government Licence The Website terms of use contain licence provisions under the terms of the UK Open Government Licence for Public Sector Inf" Covers: Met Office, Met Office National Severe Weather Warning Service, Met Office Unified Model.
• GraphCast (Google DeepMind): The README says the training data (ERA5, HRES) "may be governed by separate terms". Read the weights' licence line before any use: we have not decided "show" or "transform" from it. The README adds that the training data (ERA5, HRES) "may be governed by separate terms". Running it needs an analysis to start from (ECMWF open data) and a GPU. On the page: "use. ## License Copyright 2026 Google LLC. The Colab notebooks and the associated code are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (Apache 2.0); you may not use these materials except in compliance with the Apache 2.0 license. You may obtain a copy of t" Covers: GraphCast (Google DeepMind).
• Pangu-Weather (Huawei Cloud): Commercial use forbidden. Its outputs depend on ERA5 or ECMWF initial fields. On the page: "released by Huawei Cloud. The trained parameters of Pangu-Weather were made available under the terms of the BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. You can find details [here] (link) The commercial use of these models is forbidden. Also, please note" Covers: Pangu-Weather (Huawei).
• Aurora (Microsoft): The README has a licence section; its text was not matched in this read: unclear until read. Running it needs an analysis to start from and a GPU. On the page: "MIT License Implementation of the Aurora model. Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software" Covers: Aurora (Microsoft).
• EUMETSAT "Core" data and products: Which products are "Core" is stated product by product in EUMETSAT's catalogue: check the product before using this row. On the page: "'Recommended’ data and products. ‘Core': All EUMETSAT data and products declared as ‘Core’ by the EUMETSAT Council are made available without charge under a CC-BY-4.0 licence. You may share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any pu" Covers: EUMETSAT Data Store and EUMETView.
• EUMETSAT Meteosat level 1 data one hour old or more, and some global Metop data ("Recommended"): No fee. The design rule on this site stays: no satellite image is embedded or hotlinked until Dinis decides; this row says what the licence would allow. On the page: "acceptance of licensing terms and conditions, as summarised below. Licence for Meteosat level 1 data, with a latency of more than or equal to 1 hour, and some Global Metop data The following table provides an overview of the Recommended data covered by this li" Covers: Meteosat (geostationary), Metop (polar orbiters), EUMETSAT EUMETView.
• EUMETSAT Meteosat level 1 data newer than one hour: The storm as it happens, from space, is the one layer we may look at and not show. On the page: "register in the user portal and accept the related terms and conditions. Licence for Meteosat level 1 data with a latency of less than 1 hour The following table provides an overview of the Recommended data covered by this licence. Data currently available to " Covers: Meteosat (geostationary).
• FourCastNet (code): The licence of the trained weights was not read: unclear for the weights. On the page: "#BSD 3-Clause License # #Copyright (c) 2022, FourCastNet authors #All rights reserved. # #Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without #modification," Covers: FourCastNet (NVIDIA and others).
• Copernicus Emergency Management Service (mapping products): No activation for Storm Charles when probed (sources). On the page: "Emergency Management Service - On Demand Mapping We use satellite imagery and other geospatial data to provide free of charge mapping service in cases of natural hazards, human-made emergency situations and humanitarian crises throughout the world. 2 activatio" Covers: Copernicus Emergency Management Service.
• IPMA website (pages, charts, radar and satellite images): incident.weatherwatch@ read the same page for the radar (research/weather-sites/imagery.json): the terms are silent on hotlinking, so the site links to the radar as text. On the page: "símbolos nacionais existentes neste site para uso pessoal ou público desde que dessa utilização não decorram finalidades lucrativas ou ofensivas. O Utilizador deve referir, sempre, a fonte de informação. No que respeita aos sítios para que este site faz ligaçã" Covers: IPMA, IPMA's weather radars.

The sites people look at

Read by incident.weatherwatch@, not by us: each site's licence as recorded in research/weather-sites/sites.json, with its own terms page on the site's page. "May we show it" is their column; store and transform were not assessed per site: for a site whose terms reserve all rights, both are no.