Earth Data School
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Full catalog/NEXRAD
NEXRAD·dataset

US weather radar archive and live feed (NOAA NEXRAD)

NEXRAD on AWS
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Detailed radar scans showing precipitation, storms, and their movement across the United States, available both in real time and as a long historical archive.

How it's made. Collected by NOAA's nationwide Next Generation Weather Radar network of Doppler radars; this is the lower-level Level II radar data.

How & where you'd use it. Used for tracking storms and rainfall, issuing severe-weather warnings, and research; a key raw input for many downstream weather products.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureearth observationnatural resourceweathermeteorological

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

Real-time and archival data from the Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) network. Update The NEXRAD Level II archive data is moving to a new bucket: unidata-nexrad-level2 and SNS topic: arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:684042711724:NewNEXRADLevel2Archive . The old bucket and SNS topic are now deprecated and will no longer be available starting September 1, 2025.

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).