FORECAST ARCTIC
ECMWF's high-resolution run and Environment Canada's CAPS, on one map of the top of the world
The Arctic, right now
LOADING…Towns and research stations around the Arctic Ocean, with ECMWF's 2 m temperature and wind for the current hour. Click one for its forecast. Drawn on a north polar stereographic projection — true to scale at 70°N, 45°W pointing down, so Greenland sits at the bottom and Siberia across the top — over relief drawn here from the elevation itself.
The grids
ECMWF 00·06·12·18 UTC · CAPS 00·12 UTCThe signposts
NO ROADS · GREAT-CIRCLE KMThe Arctic Ocean has no highways, so it has no exit signs — but Longyearbyen keeps a post of arrows pointing at the world's cities, and every expedition to the North Pole plants a striped pole for its photograph. These are ours: the great-circle distance from the top of the world to the towns around it, and to the places people fly home to.
How to read it
Pick a grid, then a field. Arctic and Hemisphere are ECMWF's high-resolution run (0.1°, about 9 km at the equator and finer toward the pole), hourly to 90 hours and three-hourly to six days. CAPS is Environment Canada's 3 km Canadian Arctic Prediction System, hourly for two days. Switching grids holds the valid time, so the same moment stays on screen.
Read a value anywhere. Every frame is a colour-mapped image drawn through a fixed palette — a reversible encoding of the field — so the pointer reads the model's number back out of whichever pixel it is over, and each station label carries its own value.
Some fields are three-hourly. The upper air (850 hPa temperature, 500 hPa height, the 250 hPa jet) and sea-ice thickness come from ECMWF's open-data feed every three hours; between those hours the map keeps the latest frame and says which hour it is from. Precipitation is the amount in the hour — or the three hours — ending at the frame, and the legend says which.
Everything is in UTC, with Longyearbyen time alongside on the ECMWF grids and Iqaluit time on CAPS. Temperatures default to Celsius and winds to km/h, and the toggles above are remembered on every page.