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Full catalog/REANALYSES PDS
REANALYSES PDS·dataset

Joint NOAA-NASA archive of Earth observations (NOAA)

NOAA NASA Joint Archive (NNJA) of Observations for Earth System Reanalysis
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. A curated collection of raw Earth-system observations since 1979, spanning the atmosphere, ice, land, and ocean, with the measurement error estimates needed to use them.

How it's made. Teams at NOAA and NASA assembled this shared archive in standard science formats so reanalysis projects can all start from the same observations.

How & where you'd use it. It is a low-level input dataset that lets climate scientists fairly compare different reanalysis systems by removing differences in source data.

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 NOAA NASA Joint Archive (NNJA) of Observations for Earth System Reanalysis is a curated joint observation archive containing Earth system data from 1979 to present prepared by teams at NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory and NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. The goal is to foster collaboration across organizations and develop the ability for direct comparison of Earth System reanalysis results. Providing a singular dataset for observation input use will allow reanalyses to be compared on their unique development qualities by removing the variation from using different observations. We anticipate that the open dataset will be of value to the wider Earth System community, including future applications outside of the original goal of reanalysis production. The archive is hosted in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket with atmosphere, ice, land and ocean observations in formats including bufr, ioda, and netcdf. The general structure file structure is noaa-reanalyses-pds/observations/reanalysis/{sensor}/{source(s)}/YYYY/MM/{file format}/{data files}. Some data is reprocessed as appropriate. The dataset also includes specification of observational errors and a black/white list for historic observations which can be access via the NNJA site.

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).