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NDFD·dataset

NOAA's official gridded US weather forecasts

NOAA National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. A seamless grid of forecast weather elements people care about, such as cloud cover and maximum temperature, knitted together into one consistent map of expected conditions.

How it's made. Built by combining forecasts that NWS field offices prepare in collaboration with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction into a single digital mosaic.

How & where you'd use it. The source behind many official NWS forecast products that the public and businesses use for day-to-day planning.

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 National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) is a suite of gridded forecasts of sensible weather elements (e.g., cloud cover, maximum temperature). Forecasts prepared by NWS field offices working in collaboration with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) are combined in the NDFD to create a seamless mosaic of digital forecasts from which operational NWS products are generated. The most recent data is under the opnl and expr prefixes. A copy is also placed under the wmo prefix. The wmo prefix is structured like so: wmo/<parameter>/<year>/<month>/<day>/<wmo-file-name> The wmo filename codes can be deciphered using the spreadsheet in the root of the bucket.

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).