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Full catalog/NOS CORA
NOS CORA·dataset

Decades-long US coastal water-level and wave record (NOAA CORA)

NOAA's Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA) Dataset: 1979-2022
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. A reconstructed hourly history of coastal water levels and nearshore waves for the Gulf, US East Coast, and Caribbean, covering 1979 through 2022 at fine spatial detail.

How it's made. NOAA produced it by coupling storm-surge and wave models (ADCIRC and SWAN) and blending in verified hourly tide-gauge observations to keep the reconstruction accurate; delivered in NetCDF files.

How & where you'd use it. Supports coastal flood-risk studies, infrastructure planning, and understanding how water levels and waves have behaved over four decades.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureweatherclimateenvironmentaldisaster responsetransportationoceans

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

NOAA's Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA) for the Gulf, East Coast/Atlantic, and Caribbean (GEC) is produced using verified hourly water levels from the National Ocean Service’s Center of Operational Oceanographic Products & Services (CO-OPS). ADvanced CIRCulation Model (ADCIRC) and Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) models are coupled to model coastal water levels and nearshore waves. Hourly water level observations are used for data assimilation and validation to improve the accuracy of modeled water levels and wave datasets. Additional Details: Metadata associated with model domain and time span: - Timeseries - 1979 to 2022 - Size - Approx. 44.6 TB - Domain - Lat 5.8 to 45.8 ; Long -98.0 to -53.8 - Nodes - CORA Metadata Library - Grid cells - CORA Metadata Library - Spatial Resolution: - Centroids: 300-400 meters - Gridded: 500 meters - Projection: 1983 Contiguous USA Albers projection (EPSG:5070) NOTICE: Upcoming AWS S3 Directory Restructuring: Water level and wave datasets resulting from the computation, assimilation, validation, and optimization reanalysis datasets. All products are available in NetCDF (.nc) format: - Effective Date: May - September, 2026 - Changes: CORA datasets are being restructured within NOAA’s S3 Directory Catalogs to support the addition of new domains, derived data, and product application. Before this point, datasets were stored by version to support prototyping. As production and application evolve, this change supports a more stable long-term infrastructure. - CORA Datasets will be rearranged by - Domain: CORA-GEC, CORA-Pac, etc. - Format: Nati

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).