FORECAST ITALY
Italy's own models, rendered the way they deserve — six forecasts and one radar, from the Alps to Lampedusa, in the colours ItaliaMeteo draws them in.
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FREE · NO ACCOUNT · ITALIAMETEO OPEN DATAModel Explorer
The national model — ICON at 2.2 km over the whole country and its seas, run by ItaliaMeteo with Arpae on ECMWF boundaries, assimilating surface, radiosonde and aircraft observations. Temperature, wind, rain, pressure, cloud and the snow on the ground, hourly to three days.
MOLOCH 1.2 km
The finest grid published free anywhere over Italy — CNR-ISAC's non-hydrostatic model, nested inside BOLAM, resolving convection rather than parameterising it. The one to open when the question is where a thunderstorm actually goes.
Radar Italia
The Civil Protection's national radar mosaic — what is actually falling, measured rather than forecast, refreshed every five minutes and drawn on the scale Italians already read it on.
Sea State
WAVEWATCH III across the whole Mediterranean, Gibraltar to the Levant — significant wave height and mean period, out to three days. The Tyrrhenian, the Adriatic, the Ionian and the Sicily Channel each have their own framing.
The Mediterranean
MOLOCH's parent on the same rotated grid, 8 km from the Atlantic approaches to the Black Sea and from the Atlas to Denmark. The synoptic frame: where the trough that reaches Italy tomorrow is today.
Radar assimilation
CIMA's 2.5 km run, and the only forecast in Italian open data that assimilates the Civil Protection radar. Worth comparing against the others in the first twelve hours, which is where assimilating radar earns its keep.
Why this site exists
Six models, one instrument
Italy publishes more free high-resolution NWP than almost anywhere in Europe, from five different institutes, and nowhere are they drawn on one frame. Flip ICON-2I against MOLOCH against WRF at the same valid instant and every difference on screen is a real disagreement between forecasts, not an artefact of two different maps.
ItaliaMeteo's own colours
The colour tables here are the national service's, taken from the styles its map server draws with rather than eyedropped: the temperature scale that turns pink again past 36 °C, the rain scale that changes hue at 20 mm, the freezing level drawn as a relief map. Every other table in the network's collection of eleven hundred is one click away.
The picture is the data
Every frame is a palettised PNG whose palette is the colour ramp, so the image is a reversible encoding of the forecast: point at anywhere on the map and the value comes back out, with no extra bytes published. Ramps are pinned to absolute values, so a loop shows the weather changing and never the palette re-fitting itself.
Part of a network
Forecast Italy is the Italian member of a family of model sites: Forecast Norway reads MET Norway, Forecast Britain reads the Met Office, Forecast Euro reads ECMWF, Forecast Canada reads the MSC suite, and weather.city covers places rather than models. BOLAM's domain takes in France, Iberia, the Balkans and North Africa, so the maps here already reach well past Italy.