The Global Forecast System (GFS) is a weather forecast model produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). Dozens of atmospheric and land-soil variables are available through this dataset, from temperatures, winds, and precipitation to soil moisture and atmospheric ozone concentration. The GFS data files stored here can be immediately used for OAR/ARL’s NOAA-EPA Atmosphere-Chemistry Coupler Cloud (NACC-Cloud) tool, and are in a Network Common Data Form (netCDF), which is a very common format used across the scientific community. These particular GFS files contain a comprehensive number of global atmosphere/land variables at a relatively high spatiotemporal resolution (approximately 13x13 km horizontal, vertical resolution of 127 levels, and hourly), are not only necessary for the NACC-Cloud tool to adequately drive community air quality applications (e.g., U.S. EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality model; https://www.epa.gov/cmaq), but can be very useful for a myriad of other applications in the Earth system modeling communities (e.g., atmosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere, etc.). While many other data file and record formats are indeed available for Earth system and climate research (e.g., GRIB, HDF, GeoTIFF), the netCDF files here are advantageous to the larger community because of the comprehensive, high spatiotemporal information they contain, and because they are more scalable, appendable, shareable, self-describing, and community-friendly (i.e., many tools available to the community of users). Out of the four operational GFS forecast cycles per day (at 00Z, 06Z, 12Z and 18Z) this particular netCDF dataset is updated daily (/inputs/yyyymmdd/) for the 12Z cycle and includes 24-hr output for both 2D (gfs.t12z.sfcf$0hh.nc) and 3D variables (gfs.t12z.atmf$0hh.nc).

Also available are netCDF formatted Global Land Surface Datasets (GLSDs) developed by Hung et al. (2024). The GLSDs are based on numerous satellite products, and have been gridded to match the GFS spatial resolution (~13x13 km). These GLSDs contain vegetation canopy data (e.g., land surface type, vegetation clumping index, leaf area index, vegetative canopy height, and green vegetation fraction) that are supplemental to and can be combined with the GFS meteorological netCDF data for various applications, including NOAA-ARL's canopy-app. The canopy data variables are climatological, based on satellite data from the year 2020, combined with GFS meteorology for the year 2022, and are created at a daily temporal resolution (/inputs/geo-files/gfs.canopy.t12z.2022mmdd.sfcf000.global.nc)

NOAA's Global Forecast System (GFS) is a weather forecast model produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). Dozens of atmospheric and land-soil variables are available through this dataset, from temperatures, winds, and precipitation to soil moisture and atmospheric ozone concentration. The entire globe is covered by the GFS at a base horizontal resolution of 18 miles (28 kilometers) between grid points, which is used by the operational forecasters who predict weather out to 16 days in the future. Horizontal resolution drops to 44 miles (70 kilometers) between grid point for forecasts between one week and two weeks. Google Cloud and NOAA are making available a 7-day rolling copy of the real-time data as part of our collaboration . To learn more about the Global Forecast System, visit NOAA's landing page GFS data can be found in the GFS bucket: gs://global-forecast-system Console: https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/global-forecast-system Pub/Sub topics you can subscribe to for updates: projects/gcp-public-data-weather/topics/global-forecast-system This public dataset is hosted in Google Cloud Storage and available free to use. Use this quick start guide to learn how to access public datasets on Google Cloud Storage.