Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/HRRR PDS
HRRR PDS·dataset

Hourly high-resolution US weather forecast (NOAA HRRR)

NOAA High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) Model
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. A very detailed, frequently refreshed forecast of US weather, fine enough to resolve individual thunderstorms. It updates every hour and folds in radar observations to sharpen the near-term picture.

How it's made. NOAA runs this 3-kilometer model in real time, refreshing it hourly and assimilating radar data every 15 minutes; the cloud-friendly Zarr version is published with the University of Utah.

How & where you'd use it. Valuable for short-term forecasting of severe storms, aviation, and any situation where the next few hours of weather matter most.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimateweatherenvironmentaldisaster response

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 HRRR is a NOAA real-time 3-km resolution, hourly updated, cloud-resolving, convection-allowing atmospheric model, initialized by 3km grids with 3km radar assimilation. Radar data is assimilated in the HRRR every 15 min over a 1-h period adding further detail to that provided by the hourly data assimilation from the 13km radar-enhanced Rapid Refresh. The HRRR ZARR formatted data was originally generated by the University of Utah under a grant provided by NOAA. They are are continuing to publish ZARR versions of HRRR data. For information about data in the s3://hrrrzarr/ please contact atmos-mesowest@lists.utah.edu.

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).