NOMADS A Climate and Weather Model strongArchivestrong at the National.pdf

NOMADS A Climate and Weather Model Archive at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by Glenn K. Rutledge NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center Asheville, NC Jordan Alpert and Wesley Ebuisaki NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction Camp Springs, MD Never before has the U.S. maintained a digital archive for its operational weather models, and an innovative data access philosophy promotes interoperable access across the geosciences. Abstract An on-line archive of real-time and historical weather and climate model output and observational data is now available from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This archive, known as the NOAA National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS), was jointly initiated in 2001 by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). At present NOMADS provides access to real-time and historical (1) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model input and output, (2) GFDL’s Coupled Global Climate Models (CGCM) output, (3) global and regional reanalysis from NCEP and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and (4) limited surface, upper-air and satellite observational datasets from NCDC, NOAA’s National Ocean Data Center (NODC), and NOAA’s Forecast System Laboratory (FSL). NOMADS is but one of many similar data services across the U.S. and abroad, that are embracing and leveraging various pilot efforts toward distributed data access using agreed-to dat