FORECAST ARABIA
The free global models over the Middle East, on one frame — because no service in the region publishes its own.
One frame, and seventeen ways in
LOADING…Click a country to open the explorer framed on it, or a city to zoom to it. There are no per-country maps behind these links and there should not be: a Shamal is born over Iraq and dies in the Gulf of Aden. The relief is ETOPO at one arc-minute rather than a model's orography, and the difference is the argument /mesoscale makes: block-average this ground to the finest cell on this site and Oman's Hajar falls from 2,792 m to 1,952; at the 28 km the other three models run, it is 1,458. The mountains on this plate are the ones that are there, not the ones the forecast was computed on.
Start here
FREE · NO ACCOUNT · ECMWF, DWD AND NCEP OPEN DATAModel Explorer
Every field this site draws, hour by hour, on one Middle East frame. Hover anywhere for the number under the pixel; switch model and the valid time is held, so a difference between the tabs is a real disagreement rather than two different moments.
Heat & humidity
Air temperature alone does not describe a Gulf August. Wet-bulb is a first-class product here, with its bands cut where survivability changes — and the Gulf's shallow, 35 °C water is why this coast reaches them at all.
Dust and visibility
In this domain visibility is not a fog product. It is what closes Kuwait's airport and grounds the Dammam road, and it is carried on every model here for that reason.
The Shamal
The north-westerly that runs the length of this frame — born behind a trough over Mesopotamia, funnelled down the Gulf, and still blowing when it reaches Oman two days later. The single best argument for not cutting this region into seventeen maps.
Who publishes what
Every meteorological service in this frame, checked one at a time for reusable gridded output. Not one publishes any. Israel's IMS has a real free observations API and Türkiye's MGM has an undocumented JSON endpoint; the rest is web pages.
The model this region does not have
ICON-LAM, WRF or MPAS over this domain, in core-hours and dollars, with the arithmetic shown. The whole Middle East at 6.5 km is about 12,000 core-hours a month; convection-permitting at 3 km is 37 minutes on eight GPUs. The dominant cost is not compute, it is boundary conditions.
Why this site exists
Nobody here publishes
Every other site in this network reads a national service's own model. This one reads none, because there is none to read — we checked all seventeen. So the models are global, and the frame is regional.
Fields chosen for this region
Wet-bulb as a first-class product, temperature to +54, visibility carried as a dust field, and a rainfall ramp that starts at half a millimetre. Inherited field lists are built for places where it rains.
Absolute colour scales
Every ramp is pinned to real values, so a loop shows the weather changing and never the palette re-fitting itself. And every pixel reads back: hover anywhere for the number.
Part of a network
Forecast Arabia is the Middle Eastern member of a family of model sites: Forecast Euro reads ECMWF, Forecast Britain reads the Met Office, Forecast Poland reads IMGW-PIB, Forecast Swiss reads MeteoSwiss, and weather.city covers places rather than models. Same viewer, same colour tables, same probe — pointed at different institutes, and here at the institutes that will publish rather than the ones nearby.