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Full catalog/OAR MYRORSS PDS
OAR MYRORSS PDS·dataset

US storm radar reanalysis, 1998 to 2011 (NOAA)

NOAA Multi-Year Reanalysis of Remotely Sensed Storms (MYRORSS)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. A three-dimensional archive of weather radar across the entire lower 48 states, plus derived products like storm-top heights, estimated hail size, and rotation signals that hint at tornadoes.

How it's made. NOAA ran historical NEXRAD radar data through its Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor framework and quality-controlled it by hand to remove errors.

How & where you'd use it. Researchers use this carefully cleaned record from 1998 to 2011 to study severe storms, hail, and tornadoes.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureearth observationmeteorologicalnatural resourcesustainabilityweather

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 Multi-Year Reanalysis of Remotely Sensed Storms (MYRORSS) consists of radar reflectivity data run through the Multi-Radar, Multi-Sensor (MRMS) framework to create a three-dimensional radar volume on a quasi-Cartesian latitude-longitude grid across the entire contiguous United States. The radar reflectivity grid is also combined with hourly forecast model analyses to produce derived products such as echo top heights and hail size estimates. Radar Doppler velocity data was also processed into two azimuthal shear layer products. The source radar data was from the NEXRAD Level-II archive and the model analyses came from NOAA's Rapid Update Cycle model. Radar reflectivity was quality controlled to remove non-weather echoes and the data set was manually quality contolled to remove errors as revealed through inspection of daily accumulations of the hail size product and the azimuthal shear products. MYRORSS contains data from April 1998 through December 2011. The horizontal resolution is 0.01 ° by 0.01 ° and the vertical spacing is stretched where at the lowest levels the spacing is 250-m and at the top of the domain 1000-m. The radar data was merged at imperfect timesteps, though in general the temporal spacing is around 5-min.

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).