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Full catalog/ARL HYSPLIT
ARL HYSPLIT·dataset

Weather data for tracking where air came from (NOAA)

NOAA HYSPLIT-compatible meteorological data archives
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. An archive of weather model data used to trace how air masses move, so you can follow a puff of smoke, dust, or pollution to its source or predict where it will go.

How it's made. Built by NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory from National Weather Service forecast model data, archived to feed the widely used HYSPLIT air-transport model.

How & where you'd use it. Used to track wildfire smoke, volcanic ash, dust, radioactive releases, and pollution, and to pin down where contaminated air originated.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimatedisaster responseenvironmentalmeteorologicalweather

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

The HYSPLIT model is a complete system for computing simple air parcel trajectories, as well as complex transport, dispersion, chemical transformation, and deposition simulations. HYSPLIT continues to be one of the most extensively used atmospheric transport and dispersion models in the atmospheric sciences community. A common application is a back trajectory analysis to determine the origin of air masses and establish source-receptor relationships. HYSPLIT has also been used in a variety of simulations describing the atmospheric transport, dispersion, and deposition of pollutants and hazardous materials. Some examples of the applications include tracking and forecasting the release of radioactive material, wildfire smoke, windblown dust, pollutants from various stationary and mobile emission sources, allergens and volcanic ash. The National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) runs a series of computer analyses and forecasts operationally. NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) routinely uses NCEP model data for use in air quality transport and dispersion modeling calculations. In 1989 ARL began to archive some of these datasets for future research studies. ARL has in the past, or is presently archiving the following NCEP datasets that are compatible with HYSPLIT. A few datasets that are created outside NOAA are also included. HYSPLIT-compatible meteorological datasets are required to run HYSPLIT for trajectory or dispersion simulations. The HYSPLIT-compatible meteorological datasets can also be used with HYSPLIT utilities to display and/or

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).