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OAR ARL NACC PDS·dataset

Global GFS weather forecast in netCDF format (NOAA)

NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) netCDF Formatted Data
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Dozens of global atmospheric and land variables from NOAA's main weather model, including temperature, winds, precipitation, soil moisture, and atmospheric ozone, at about 13 km resolution.

How it's made. This is the standard NOAA Global Forecast System output, repackaged into the widely used netCDF science file format and 127 vertical levels.

How & where you'd use it. It feeds air-quality and Earth-system models; it is essentially a raw input dataset prepared for researchers and modelers rather than a finished public product.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimatedisaster responseenvironmentalmeteorologicalweather

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 Global Forecast System (GFS) is a weather forecast model produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). Dozens of atmospheric and land-soil variables are available through this dataset, from temperatures, winds, and precipitation to soil moisture and atmospheric ozone concentration. The GFS data files stored here can be immediately used for OAR/ARL’s NOAA-EPA Atmosphere-Chemistry Coupler Cloud (NACC-Cloud) tool, and are in a Network Common Data Form (netCDF), which is a very common format used across the scientific community. These particular GFS files contain a comprehensive number of global atmosphere/land variables at a relatively high spatiotemporal resolution (approximately 13x13 km horizontal, vertical resolution of 127 levels, and hourly), are not only necessary for the NACC-Cloud tool to adequately drive community air quality applications (e.g., U.S. EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality model; https://www.epa.gov/cmaq), but can be very useful for a myriad of other applications in the Earth system modeling communities (e.g., atmosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere, etc.). While many other data file and record formats are indeed available for Earth system and climate research (e.g., GRIB, HDF, GeoTIFF), the netCDF files here are advantageous to the larger community because of the comprehensive, high spatiotemporal information they contain, and because they are more scalable, appendable, shareable, self-describing, and community-friendly (i.e., many tools available to the community of users). Out of the four operational GFS forecast cycles per

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).