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

US severe-weather and rainfall radar blend (NOAA MRMS)

NOAA Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor System (MRMS)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Over 100 fast-updating products diagnosing hazards like hail, damaging wind, tornadoes, and rainfall amounts, along with aviation concerns such as icing and turbulence, all as detailed gridded maps.

How it's made. Automated algorithms quickly merge data from many radars, surface and upper-air observations, lightning detectors, satellites, and forecast models into a unified national picture.

How & where you'd use it. Supports rapid decisions in severe-weather warnings, flood prediction, aviation, and emergency response across the US.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimatemeteorologicalweather

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 MRMS system was developed to produce severe weather, transportation, and precipitation products for improved decision-making capability to improve hazardous weather forecasts and warnings, along with hydrology, aviation, and numerical weather prediction. MRMS is a system with fully-automated algorithms that quickly and intelligently integrate data streams from multiple radars, surface and upper air observations, lightning detection systems, satellite observations, and forecast models. Numerous two-dimensional multiple-sensor products offer assistance for hail, wind, tornado, quantitative precipitation estimations, convection, icing, and turbulence diagnosis. MRMS is being used to develop and test new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) NextGen products in addition to advancing techniques in quality control, icing detection, and turbulence in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and Lincoln Laboratories. MRMS was deployed operationally in 2014 at the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). All of the 100+ products it produces are available via NCEP to all of the WFOs, RFCs, CWSUs and NCEP service centers. In addition, the MRMS product suite is publicly available to any other entity who wishes to access and use the data. Other federal agencies that use MRMS include FEMA, DOD, FAA, and USDA. MRMS is the proposed operational version of the WDSS-II and NMQ research systems. The MRMS system was jointly developed in cooperation with the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impa

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).