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Full catalog/UFS LAND DA
UFS LAND DA·dataset

Land-surface model and sample data (NOAA)

NOAA Unified Forecast System (UFS) Land Data Assimilation (DA) System
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. A stand-alone land-surface model that simulates conditions like soil and snow, packaged with sample weather forcing and starting data.

How it's made. NOAA runs the Noah-MP land model in offline mode within the Unified Forecast System, using the JEDI framework to blend in observations like snow depth.

How & where you'd use it. It is a research and development tool for improving how forecast models represent the land surface, not a finished public dataset.

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 Unified Forecast System (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. It supports "multiple applications" covering different forecast durations and spatial domains. The Land Data Assimilation (DA) System is an offline version of the Noah Multi-Physics (Noah-MP) land surface model (LSM) used in the UFS Weather Model (WM). Its data assimilation framework uses "[Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration - JEDI] (https://www.jcsda.org/jcsda-project-jedi)" software. The offline Noah-MP LSM is a stand-alone, uncoupled model used to execute land surface simulations. In this traditional uncoupled mode, near-surface atmospheric forcing data is required as input. Sample forcing and restart data are provided in this data bucket. The Noah-MP LSM has evolved through community efforts to pursue and refine a modern-era LSM suitable for use in the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) operational weather and climate prediction models. This collaborative effort continues with participation from entities such as NCAR, NCEP, NASA, and university groups. For details regarding the physical parameterizations used in Noah-MP, see "[Niu, et al. (2011)] (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2010JD015139)". The "[Land DA User’s Guide] (https://land-da.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)" provides information on building and running the Land DA System in offline mode. Users can access additional technical support via the "[UFS GitHub Discussions] (https://github.com/NOAA-EPIC/land-offline_workflow/discussions)" for the Land DA System.

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).