Fire Data Sources
Data Sources
Many sources of weather data for initialization, assimilation, and verification are freely available through public sites.
Surface weather data
The Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) http://madis.noaa.gov/ compiles surface weather data from many networks (http://madis.noaa.gov/network_info.html).
Mesowest http://mesowest.utah.edu/index.html
Remote Automated Weather Station (RAWS) data http://raws.wrh.noaa.gov/roman/
METAR, the international standard code format for hourly surface weather observations, data are available at http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml
NOAA NCDC land based data http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/land.html
Vertical profiles of atmospheric properties
Atmospheric soundings http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html
NOAA Radiosonde Network
NOAA NCDC Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/igra/index.php