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Full catalog/WSA ENLIL
WSA ENLIL·dataset

Space weather model of solar storms reaching Earth (NOAA WSA-Enlil)

NOAA Wang Sheeley Arge (WSA) Enlil
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. This model output tracks how solar eruptions, known as coronal mass ejections, travel outward through space from the Sun toward Earth's orbit. It describes the disturbances and structures moving through the solar wind along the way.

How it's made. NOAA runs it by linking two models: a near-Sun model (Wang-Sheeley-Arge) that uses maps of the Sun's magnetic field from ground-based observations, feeding a physics-based model (Enlil) that simulates conditions from just above the Sun out past Earth.

How & where you'd use it. Forecasters use it to anticipate when solar storms will hit Earth, helping protect satellites, power grids, and communications from space weather impacts.

What's measured

aws-pdsclimatemeteorologicalsolarweather

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 WSA-Enlil heliospheric model provides critical information regarding the propagation of solar Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and transient structures within the heliosphere. Two distinct models comprise the WSA-Enlil modeling system; 1) the Wang-Sheeley-Arge (WSA) semi-empirical solar coronal model, and 2) the Enlil magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) heliospheric model. MHD modeling of the full domain (solar photosphere to Earth) is extremely computationally demanding due to the large parameter space and resulting characteristic speeds within the system. To reduce the computational burden and improve the timeliness (and hence the utility in forecasting space weather disturbances) of model results, the domain of the MHD model (Enlil) is limited from 21.5 Solar Radii (R_s) to just beyond the orbit of Earth, while the inner portion, spanning from the solar photosphere to 21.5R_s, is characterized by the WSA model. This coupled modeling system is driven by solar synoptic maps composed of numerous magnetogram observations from the National Solar Observatory’s (NSO) Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG). Such maps provide a full surface description of solar photospheric magnetic flux density, while not accounting for the evolution of surface features for regions outside the view of the observatories. In its current configuration (NOAA WSA-Enlil V3.0), the modeling system consists of WSA V5.4 and Enlil V2.9e. The system relies upon the zero point corrected GONG synoptic maps (mrzqs) to define the inner photospheric boundary. The full 3D datasets from the operational model are provided

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).