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Full catalog/RTOFS
RTOFS·dataset

Global ocean and sea ice forecast, 8 days (NOAA)

NOAA Global Real-Time Ocean Forecast System (Global RTOFS)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Worldwide forecasts of ocean temperature, saltiness, current speed, sea surface height, and sea ice cover and thickness, out to eight days ahead.

How it's made. NOAA runs a high-resolution global ocean model (HYCOM) coupled with a sea ice model, updated daily and corrected with satellite and other observations.

How & where you'd use it. It supports shipping, search-and-rescue, fisheries, and disaster response by predicting ocean and ice conditions across the globe.

What's measured

aws-pdsglobalcoastaldisaster responseweatherwaterenvironmentalmeteorologicaloceansclimate

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

NOAA is soliciting public comment on petential changes to the Real Time Ocean Forecast System (RTOFS) through March 27, 2024. Please see Public Notice at (https://www.weather.gov/media/notification/pdf_2023_24/pns24-12_rtofs_v2.4.0.pdf) NOAA's Global Real-Time Ocean Forecast System (Global RTOFS) provides users with nowcasts (analyses of near present conditions) and forecast guidance up to eight days of ocean temperature and salinity, water velocity, sea surface elevation, sea ice coverage and sea ice thickness. The Global Operational Real-Time Ocean Forecast System (Global RTOFS) is based on an eddy resolving 1/12° global HYCOM (HYbrid Coordinates Ocean Model) (https://www.hycom.org/), which is coupled to the Community Ice CodE (CICE) Version 4 (https://www.arcus.org/witness-the-arctic/2018/5/highlight/1). The RTOFS grid has a 1/12 degree horizontal resolution and 41 hybrid vertical levels on a global tripolar grid. Since 2020, the RTOFS system implements a multivariate, multi-scale 3DVar data assimilation algorithm (Cummings and Smedstad, 2014) using a 24-hour update cycle. The data types presently assimilated include (1) satellite Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from METOP-B, JPSS-VIIRS, and in-Situ SST, from ships, fixed and drifting buoys (2) Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) from SMAP, SMOS, and buoys (3) profiles of Temperature and Salinity from Animal-borne, Alamo floats, Argo floats, CTD, fixed buoys, gliders, TESAC, and XBT (4) Absolute Dynamic Topography (ADT) from Altika, Cryosat, Jason-3, Sentinel 3a, 3b, 6a (5) sea ice concentration from SSMI/S, AMSR2 The system is des

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).