Forecast Israel is the Israeli member of the Forecast network. It puts the three global models a forecaster in Israel reads — ECMWF's, Germany's and Britain's — over the same ground at the same instant, beside the Israel Meteorological Service's own forecasts, observations and warnings, on one atlas of the land.

Why three global models

The Israel Meteorological Service runs its own limited-area models — a high-resolution COSMO ensemble over the Eastern Mediterranean and an ICON configuration, on ECMWF's supercomputers — but publishes their results as forecasts, not as open grids. No Israeli model output is open data. What is open, and what the IMS's forecasters themselves read first, are the global models: so this site shows three of them, side by side, and the IMS's word beside them.

The models

• ECMWF HRES — the European Centre's high-resolution forecast, from its open data at 0.1°, four cycles a day, hourly to +90 h and three- and six-hourly to +144 h. Rendered by Forecast Euro.
• DWD ICON — the Deutscher Wetterdienst's global model, about 13 km on its icosahedral grid, four cycles a day to +180 h (+120 h at 06 and 18 UTC), with the upper air: 500 hPa height, 850 hPa temperature, the jet. Rendered by Forecast Germany.
• Met Office Global — the Unified Model at 10 km, four cycles a day to +168 h, from the Met Office's open data on AWS. Rendered by Forecast Britain.

All three are rendered once, globally, in Web Mercator by those sites, and this site reads the same frames — it runs no model ingest 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 all three 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 town pages and the plate go one better: every ten minutes this site reads the palette index at each of its 53 places, which recovers the value exactly to the frame's own precision — about half a degree for ECMWF and the Met Office. 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.

The Israel Meteorological Service

• the four-day forecast for the fifteen cities the IMS issues one for (maximum and minimum, weather, humidity, wind);
• the national text forecast, in English and Hebrew;
• the latest ten-minute observation from its automatic stations, shown on the plate under IMS observed and on the page of the place each station stands in or beside;
• its warnings, in English.

All four are read from the IMS's public XML and RSS feeds every ten minutes and shown as published, with the source credited. They are not altered, and nothing the models say is presented as the IMS's.

The plate

The front-page map is drawn in the Israeli Transverse Mercator — the Survey of Israel's national grid, a transverse Mercator on the meridian through Jerusalem (35.2045°E) — at about 245 m to the plate unit. Its relief is made here from the Copernicus GLO-90 elevation model and NOAA's ETOPO 2022 bathymetry by the network's atlas maker: multidirectional and texture shading, a cast shadow from the north-west, and a land tint cross-blended from humid to arid on the Köppen-Geiger climate map, which is why Galilee is green and the Negev is sand. The rift — the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea shore and the Arava, down to 430 m below sea level — is drawn as the land it is; the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea's two basins are painted from Natural Earth.

Boundaries

Boundaries are Natural Earth's de facto lines: Israel's districts, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (the Green Line dashed), and the neighbours. 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.

Not a warning service

This is not an official forecast. For warnings, use the Israel Meteorological Service.