Forecast Russia is the Russian member of the Forecast network. It puts two global models — ECMWF's and Germany's — over the whole country at the same instant, from Kaliningrad to Chukotka, on one atlas.

Why two global models

Roshydromet publishes forecasts, not open model grids, and no Russian numerical model output is open data. What is open, and what is read everywhere, are the global models; this site shows the two with the widest, best-documented open feeds, side by side, and holds the valid time as you switch between them.

The models

• ECMWF HRES — the European Centre's high-resolution forecast, from its open data at 0.1° (about 9 km), four cycles a day. Rendered by Forecast Euro.
• DWD ICON Global — the Deutscher Wetterdienst's global model, about 13 km on its icosahedral grid, four cycles a day, with the upper air: 500 hPa height, 850 hPa temperature, the jet. Rendered by Forecast Germany.

Both are rendered once, for the whole planet, in Web Mercator by those sites, and this site reads the same frames — it runs no model ingest, downloads no model data and stores no model imagery. The colours are each centre's own, so they are not comparable from one model to the next; the values are, and the explorer's compare readout prints both at one point in one set of units.

How a number is made

Every frame is a palettised PNG whose palette is a reversible encoding of the field. The explorer reads a value back from the colour under the pointer. The place pages and the plate go one better: whenever a model publishes a new cycle this site reads the palette index at each of its 104 places, which recovers the value exactly to the frame's own precision — about half a degree for ECMWF. ICON's maps are published on 2 °C temperature and 3 m/s wind bands, so its numbers come in those steps. Wind direction comes from each model's u/v sidecar raster.

Eleven time zones

Russia keeps eleven time zones, UTC+2 (Kaliningrad) to UTC+12 (Kamchatka and Chukotka), and no daylight saving. Every place carries its own IANA zone, and its page and its value on the plate are read at its own clock.

The plate

The front-page map is drawn on an Albers equal-area conic on 105°E with standard parallels 52° and 64°N — the kind of projection Russian atlases use, because the country is too wide and too tall for any cylindrical map (Mercator would draw Chukotka eight times too large against the Caucasus). The 180° meridian is not an edge: longitudes are unwrapped on 105°E before anything is drawn, so Chukotka and the Bering Strait's far shore are whole.

The relief is made here from NOAA's ETOPO 2022 — land and sea floor in one grid, at 2′ — by the network's atlas maker: multidirectional and texture shading, a cast shadow from the north-west, a land tint cross-blended from humid to arid on the Köppen-Geiger map and to tundra with latitude. The Caspian is sea, though it is not joined to the ocean; Baikal and the other lakes are painted from Natural Earth; the ice of Novaya Zemlya, Severnaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land comes from Natural Earth's glaciated areas. The same shading comes out in four schools of colour — atlas (National Geographic), swiss (Imhof), times (the Times Comprehensive) and nocturne (for a dark screen) — and the plate's inks follow whichever is chosen.

Boundaries

Boundaries, federal subjects, coasts, lakes and rivers are Natural Earth's de facto lines. The weather does not stop at any of them and neither does this site's coverage; drawing them is not a statement about any of them. The eight federal districts are the click targets on the plate.

Not a warning service

This is not an official forecast. For warnings, use Roshydromet.