Metadata time in Databricks

[mcrosta]

Hello,

i'm running Aurora on a GPU H100 on Databricks. I'm using ECMWF data from the 00 run.

When i add the time location in my script

import time, os
os.environ['TZ'] = 'Europe/Rome'
time.tzset()

Aurora's forecast differs from the one obtained without specifying the time zone.
In both cases i set the time metadata as time = Timestamp('2025-09-11 00:00:00') this is a UTC time based on ECMWF data

Do I have to set the timezone or not?

[wesselb]

Hey @mcrosta! This is a very good point. Aurora was not developed with time zones in mind. If you want to run an existing version of the model, I would recommend to not set a time zone and provide UTC times.

The implementation of the model could definitely be improved in this regard.