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Full catalog/NWS HAFS
NWS HAFS·dataset

Next-generation US hurricane forecast model (NOAA)

NOAA Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Forecasts of a hurricane's path, strength, size, rainfall, storm surge, and tornado risk, including the tricky problem of rapid intensification, out to about seven days.

How it's made. NOAA's Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System couples atmosphere and ocean models with observation data as part of its Unified Forecast System.

How & where you'd use it. Hurricane forecasters use it to issue track and intensity guidance that drives evacuation decisions and storm preparations.

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 last several hurricane seasons have been active with records being set for the number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. These record-breaking seasons underscore the importance of accurate hurricane forecasting. Imperative to increased forecasting skill for hurricanes is the development of the Hurricane Forecast Analysis System or HAFS. To accelerate improvements in hurricane forecasting, this project has the following goals: 1) To improve the HAFS. The HAFS is NOAA’s next-generation multi-scale numerical model, with data assimilation package and ocean coupling, which will provide an operational analysis and forecast out to seven days, with reliable and skillful guidance on hurricane track and intensity (including rapid intensification), storm size, genesis, storm surge, rainfall and tornadoes associated with hurricanes. 2) To integrate into the Unified Forecasting System(UFS). The UFS is a community-based, coupled comprehensive Earth system modeling system whose numerical applications span local to global domains and predictive time scales from sub-hourly analyses to seasonal predictions. It is designed to support the Weather Enterprise and to be the source system for NOAA’s operational numerical weather prediction applications. The HAFS will be a part of UFS geared for hurricane model applications. HAFS comprises five major components; (a) High-resolution moving nest (b) High-resolution physics (c) Multi-scale data assimilation (DA) (d) 3D ocean coupling, and (e) Observations to support the DA. Read about how the storm-following model improves in

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).