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Full catalog/UFS HTF PDS
UFS HTF PDS·dataset

Testing toolkit for NOAA's forecast system (NOAA)

NOAA Unified Forecast System (UFS) Hierarchical Testing Framework (HTF)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. This is a software testing framework and its supporting data, not weather data, designed to check that NOAA's Earth-modeling system works correctly.

How it's made. NOAA built the Hierarchical Testing Framework to standardize how the many components of the Unified Forecast System are tested across computers.

How & where you'd use it. Model developers use it to verify code reliability and reproducibility; it has no direct use for the general public.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimatedisaster responseenvironmentalmeteorologicalweatheroceans

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 "Unified Forecast System" (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth Modeling System. The Hierarchical Testing Framework (HTF) serves as a comprehensive toolkit designed to enhance the testing capabilities within UFS "repositories". It aims to standardize and simplify the testing process across various "UFS Weather Model" (WM) components and associated modules, aligning with the Hierarchical System Development (HSD) approach and NOAA baseline operational metrics. The HTF provides a structured methodology for test case design and execution, which enhances code management practices, fosters user accessibility, and promotes adherence to established testing protocols. It enables developers to conduct testing efficiently and consistently, ensuring code integrity and reliability through the use of established technologies such as CMake and CTest. When integrated with containerization techniques, the HTF facilitates portability of test cases and promotes reproducibility across different computing environments. This approach reduces the computational overhead and enhances collaboration within the UFS community by providing a unified testing framework. Acknowledgment - The Unified Forecast System (UFS) atmosphere-ocean coupled model experimental version # data used in this study are made available through the UFS Research to Operations (UFS-R2O) project sponsored by the National Weather Service (NWS) Office of Science and Technology Integration (OSTI) Modeling Program Division and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Oceanic and Atmospheric Re

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).