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Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) 2.5 Degree

Published by NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce | Metadata Last Checked: December 20, 2025 | Last Modified: 2007-10-01T00:00:00.000+00:00
The Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) is a weather forecast model made up of 21 separate forecasts, or ensemble members. The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) started the GEFS to address the nature of uncertainty in weather observations, which are used to initialize weather forecast models. The proverbial butterfly flapping her wings can have a cascading effect leading to wind gusts thousands of miles away. This extreme example illustrates that tiny, unnoticeable differences between reality and what is actually measured can, over time, lead to noticeable differences between what a weather model forecast predicts and reality itself. The GEFS attempts to quantify the amount of uncertainty in a forecast by generating an ensemble of multiple forecasts, each minutely different, or perturbed, from the original observations. With global coverage, GEFS is produced four times a day with weather forecasts going out to 16 days and a 6 hour temporal resolution. This dataset has 2.5 degree horizontal resolution.

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< 500 km or approximately 2.5 degrees - < 5.0 degrees DOC/NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC > National Climatic Data Center, NESDIS, NOAA, U.S. Department of Commerce DOC/NOAA/NESDIS/NCEI > National Centers for Environmental Information, NESDIS, NOAA, U.S. Department of Commerce

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