Weather Data Sources

3D Gridded Data

All are GRIB unless noted otherwise.

• The NOAA National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/
• NOAA National Center for Environmental Prediction model products ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/

HRRR - NOAA High-Resolution Rapid Refresh

• Used in wrfxpy
• Description at http://ruc.noaa.gov/hrrr/ http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/hrrr/
  • Resolution 1h 3km
• Data access:
  • http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/hrrr/prod/ or ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/hrrr/prod last 2 days
  • http://www.ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/data/nccf/nonoperational/com/hrrr/prod ??

NAM - North American Model

• used in wrfxpy
• Description at http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/nam/
• Resolution: 3h, Grid 218 12km, Grid 227 5km
• Data access: http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/nam/prod last moth or so (as of 2016-9-5, from 2016-8-8 to present)
• How to use with WRF: http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/OnLineTutorial/DATA/NAM/

NARR - NCEP North American Regional Reanalysis

• Used in wrfxpy
• 3h, 32km resolution
• NOMADS
  • Description at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.narr.html and ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/Datasets/NARR/README but some is offline
  • Issues page: Converting from GRIB to NetCDF4 (HDF5) as of 2016/02/11. The NetCDF data are at ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/NARR/Dailies/pressure
  • Data at http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/data/narr as of 2016-09-05, 1979-01 to 2014-10, also ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/Datasets/NARR but directory list cannot be used to determine availablity
• NCAR
  • Description http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds608.0
  • As of 2016-09-05, from 1979-01-01 to 2016-08-01
  • http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds608.0/#!access http tar, subsetting service, GLOBUS Ftp, direct file access on Glade

Surface Gridded Data

RTMA - NCEP Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis

• Used in wrfxpy
• Description: http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/rtma
  • several 2D fields at fixed height
  • 1h, 2.5km resolution
• Data access: http://www.ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/data/nccf/com/rtma/prod/

Station 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 Also supports layers with fire info.

• 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 National Climate Data Center land based data https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data

Vertical Profiles

• Atmospheric soundings http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html

• Atmospheric profiler data http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/profiler/ (not working currently)

• NOAA National Climate Data Center Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/igra/index.php

See also

• Fire Data Sources