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Full catalog/UFS SHORTRANGEWEATHER
UFS SHORTRANGEWEATHER·dataset

Short-range weather forecast model and starter data (NOAA UFS SRW)

NOAA Unified Forecast System Short-Range Weather (UFS SRW) Application
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. This is the prediction system and accompanying input files for forecasting local atmospheric weather from minutes out to several days, over a limited region. The package includes the model itself plus the terrain, land-use, and starting-condition files it needs to run.

How it's made. NOAA built it as the Short-Range Weather application of its community Unified Forecast System, bundled with a model, pre- and post-processing tools, and a ready-to-run example case.

How & where you'd use it. It lets meteorologists, students, and developers run their own short-term regional weather forecasts and learn how a modern forecasting system works end to end. This is a modeling toolkit and its raw inputs, not a finished forecast you can simply read off.

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" with different forecast durations and spatial domains. The UFS Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application figures among these applications. It targets predictions of atmospheric behavior on a limited spatial domain and on time scales from minutes to several days. The SRW Application includes a prognostic atmospheric model, pre-processor, post-processor, and community workflow for running the system end-to-end. The "SRW Application Users's Guide" includes information on these components and provides detailed instructions on how to build and run the SRW Application. Users can access additional technical support via the "UFS GitHub Discussions" This data registry contains the data required to run the “out-of-the-box” SRW Application case. The SRW App requires numerous input files to run, including static datasets (fix files containing climatological information, terrain and land use data), initial condition data files, lateral boundary condition data files, and model configuration files (such as namelists). The SRW App experiment generation system also contains a set of workflow end-to-end (WE2E) tests that exercise various configurations of the system (e.g., different grids, physics suites). Data for running a subset of these WE2E tests are also included within this registry. Users can generate forecasts for dates not included in this data registry by downloading and manually adding raw model files for the desired dates. Many of these model f

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).