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Full catalog/NAM
NAM·dataset

North American regional weather forecast model (NOAA NAM)

NOAA North American Mesoscale Forecast System (NAM)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Weather forecasts focused on North America, covering dozens of variables including temperature, precipitation, lightning, and atmospheric energy, produced at several levels of map detail.

How it's made. One of NOAA's main forecast models, run by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, with nested high-resolution grids over fixed regions and around major events like hurricanes.

How & where you'd use it. A core forecasting tool for North American weather, useful for agriculture, disaster planning, and tracking significant storms.

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 North American Mesoscale Forecast System (NAM) is one of the National Centers For Environmental Prediction’s (NCEP) major models for producing weather forecasts. NAM generates multiple grids (or domains) of weather forecasts over the North American continent at various horizontal resolutions. Each grid contains data for dozens of weather parameters, including temperature, precipitation, lightning, and turbulent kinetic energy. NAM uses additional numerical weather models to generate high-resolution forecasts over fixed regions, and occasionally to follow significant weather events like hurricanes.

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).