Weather Data

Cutouts are spatio-temporal subsets of the European weather data from the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis dataset and the CMSAF SARAH-3 solar surface radiation dataset. They have been prepared by and are for use with the atlite tool. The Tutorial: Electricity-Only uses a smaller cutout than required for the full model (30 MB), which is also automatically downloaded.

There are two ways to obtain cutouts:

• Retrieve pre-built cutouts from the archive using the retrieve_cutout rule (default). This downloads ready-made cutouts from data.pypsa.org.

• Build cutouts from scratch using the build_cutout rule. This requires access to the CDS API to download ERA5 data directly.

See also

For building your own cutouts, see build_cutout and the atlite documentation.

The following pre-built cutouts are available for download under https://data.pypsa.org/workflows/cutout/<version>/<cutout>.nc (click on a cutout name below to download directly).

v1.0

Cutout	Size
be-03-2013-era5.nc	11.1 MB
dach-03-2013-sarah3-era5.nc	35.1 MB
europe-1995-sarah3-era5.nc	6.2 GB
europe-1996-sarah3-era5.nc	6.5 GB
europe-2008-sarah3-era5.nc	6.2 GB
europe-2009-sarah3-era5.nc	6.2 GB
europe-2010-sarah3-era5.nc	6.1 GB
europe-2012-sarah3-era5.nc	6.6 GB
europe-2013-03-sarah3-era5.nc	140.5 MB
europe-2013-sarah3-era5.nc	6.1 GB
europe-2019-sarah3-era5.nc	6.1 GB
europe-2020-sarah3-era5.nc	6.6 GB
europe-2021-sarah3-era5.nc	6.1 GB
europe-2023-sarah3-era5.nc	6.1 GB
europe-2024-sarah3-era5.nc	6.7 GB
europe-2025-sarah3-era5.nc	6.7 GB

Relevant Settings

atlite:
  default_cutout:
  cutouts:

See also

Documentation of the configuration file config/config.yaml at atlite and data.

Outputs

• cutouts/{cutout}: weather data from either the ERA5 reanalysis weather dataset and/or SARAH-3 satellite-based historic weather data.