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Full catalog/NOS ECCOFS
NOS ECCOFS·dataset

US East Coast ocean analysis and forecast system (NOAA ECCOFS)

East Coast Community Ocean Forecast System (ECCOFS)
ocean NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Daily ocean analyses and forecasts for the eastern seaboard of North America and surrounding seas, describing ocean conditions in three dimensions at about 3-kilometer detail across 50 depth levels.

How it's made. Developed by NOAA with university and industry partners, it runs the Regional Ocean Modeling System with advanced data assimilation that pulls in ocean observations; planned to become operational in 2028.

How & where you'd use it. Intended to support marine navigation, coastal and ocean planning, and forecasting along the US East Coast and Intra-Americas Seas.

What's measured

aws-pdsoceansweatherenvironmentalcoastalforecastmarine

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

The East Coast Community Ocean Forecast System (ECCOFS) is a data assimilating ocean analysis and forecast system being developed by Rutgers University, the University of California Santa Cruz, Fathom Science Inc., and the National Ocean Service (NOS) of NOAA for transition to operations at NCEP in 2028. The ECCOFS domain spans the eastern seaboard of North America and Intra-Americas Seas from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the north to the mouth of the Orinoco River, Venezuela, in the south. ECCOFS will complement the existing WCOFS (West Coast Operational Forecast System) to achieve complete forecast coverage of U.S. territorial seas adjacent to the 48 contiguous states and Puerto Rico. Each day ECCOFS generates an ocean analysis using the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) 4-Dimensional Variational (4D-Var) data assimilation (DA) system constrained by ocean observations. The forecast resolution is 3 km in the horizontal at 50 vertical terrain-following levels. A more detailed overview is presented here. The meteorological forcing data are marine boundary layer conditions (air temperature, humidity, pressure), net shortwave radiation, and downward longwave radiation at 1-hourly intervals from the NWS High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) 4-km, 48-hour forecast for the northwest Atlantic Ocean and western Caribbean Sea. In regions beyond the HRRR domain, and in forecast days 3 to 5, the NWS GFS (Global Forecast System) forecast is adopted. Sub-tidal frequency open boundary conditions are drawn from the Copernicus Marine Service Global Ocean Physics Analysis and Forec

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).