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An alternative to NCEP FTP server is the HTTP access via the NCDC NOMADS server. This seems to be a archive rather than real-time, but it may help everyone patch up datasets. Looks line in some cases, the archive goes back pretty far. Enjoy. The main index to the data portals is here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/nomads/data-avail.html NCEP items can be found here: [Download option for HTTP] http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access.html NOMADS also features OPeNDAP access to the model datasets for those that want to use the brilliant Unidata IDV program. ODC, ncBrowse, gradsdods and THREDDS (THREDDS Data Viewer / Toolset; I affectionately call it TDV; http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/projects/THREDDS/tech/index.html#TDV) work for the most part. > Oh yes, we are seeing huge delays. As an example, we received last > night's 0Z run 72 hour forecast for the GFS at 2 hours and 54 later > than I was able to obtain the file via FTP (23:01:58 PST vs 20:08:15 > PST).