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RRFS·dataset

Hourly US storm-scale forecast prototype (NOAA)

NOAA Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) [Prototype]
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. High-detail forecasts on a 3 km grid covering North America, fine enough to resolve individual thunderstorms, with both single and ensemble (multiple-scenario) runs.

How it's made. This is a pre-release prototype of NOAA's next-generation, hourly-updating ensemble model, built on the Unified Forecast System and slated to go operational in 2026.

How & where you'd use it. It is aimed at aviation, severe storms, heavy rain, winter weather, and renewable energy planning; note it is experimental and not yet operationally monitored.

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 Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) next generation convection-allowing, rapidly-updated ensemble prediction system, currently scheduled for operational implementation in 2026. The operational configuration will feature a 3 km grid covering North America and include deterministic forecasts every hour out to 18 hours, with deterministic and ensemble forecasts to 60 hours four times per day at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC.The RRFS will provide guidance to support forecast interests including, but not limited to, aviation, severe convective weather, renewable energy, heavy precipitation, and winter weather on timescales where rapidly-updated guidance is particularly useful. The RRFS is underpinned by the Unified Forecast System (UFS), a community-based Earth modeling initiative, and benefits from collaborative development efforts across NOAA, academia, and research institutions. This bucket provides access to a real time, pre-implementation RRFS prototype. It also hosts some final retrospective parallel output used in the evaluation of RRFSv1 The real-time RRFS output is not under 24x7 monitoring and is not operational. Output may be delayed or missing. Outputs will change. When significant changes to output take place, this description will be updated. We currently provide hourly deterministic forecasts at 3 km grid spacing out to 84 hours at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC, and out to 18 hours for other cycles. Output is organized by cycle date and cycle hour. We are now dividing what is provided in this bucket into a ful

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).