Hi all,

Quick heads-up about a tool I've built (to scratch a itch I had for a long time), with disclosure up front: this is a paid service, so happy if a moderator feels it doesn't belong — please move/remove as needed.

Weatherfiles.com takes a model run, lets you draw a bbox, pick params (wind / pressure / temp / gusts / clouds / precip / currents) and a time window, and gives you one stable HTTPS URL per saved slice. The same link always returns the latest run, so it's cron-able. Around 25 models on the platform, all of them Europe focused — GFS, ECMWF IFS, ICON-EU and ICON-D2, ICON-CH2, HARMONIE NL/DK/FI, AROME France HD, AROME Austria, UKMO Global, UKMO UKV, plus regional ocean/current models (BSH, FCOO, MET.no Northsea/Coastal/Baltic, Copernicus MyOcean IBI, SHOM).

The reason I'm posting here specifically: there's now a `mygrib.xml` export. On the slices list, open the download-script modal and pick the Expedition mygrib tab. It outputs ready-to-paste `<provider>` / `<model>` blocks in the same signed-lon convention the bundled `mygrib.xml` uses — save as your own `mygrib.xml` or paste the blocks into your existing one. Two layouts depending on how you've sorted your slices: grouped by source model (one provider per source), or flat under a single "WeatherFiles.com" provider with model name appended to each slice.

Pricing: free Basic tier (3 saved slices, 50 MB max per slice, 10 downloads/day). Pro is €4/month for higher caps and unlimited downloads. Saildocs and direct NOMADS already cover a lot of similar use cases at no cost — this is mainly worth a look if you want HARMONIE/AROME/UKV-class regional models bundled into Expedition with one click, or you want the stable-URL-per-slice pattern for an automated pre-race pipeline. If your sat-link bandwidth is fine and you don't tune per-slice, you probably don't need it.

One Expedition-specific caveat I noticed while testing: the File-info dialog's "Updated" field shows *Invalid DateTime* for our URLs. Turns out it does the same for several entries in the bundled `mygrib.xml` template, so it appears to be an Expedition parser quirk rather than a server-side missing header — the "Analysis time" (model reference time) populates correctly.

Another thing that might be helpful is a detailed overview of all models details, runtimes and publication times on https://weatherfiles.com/models/overview

Happy to answer questions on specific models, the bbox convention, or scripting against the URLs. I really hope this is helpful.

Bart Manuelhttps://weatherfiles.com/

Last edited by bartmanuel (5/01/2026 5:24 am)