This archive contains answers to questions sent to Unidata support through mid-2025. Note that the archive is no longer being updated. We provide the archive for reference; many of the answers presented here remain technically correct, even if somewhat outdated. For the most up-to-date information on the use of NSF Unidata software and data services, please consult the Software Documentation first.
Steve, > I don't see a WRF in this directory, what would be the next best one for us > to work with? ETA? Yes, I think ETA would be good, as would GFS or RUC. There is a version of ETA called Workstation ETA that people run for local (mesoscale) forecasts, because it's freely available and can run on desktop and departmental platforms. I'm not an expert on the differences among these models, but all of these are used regularly. If you wanted some data from a recent Workstation ETA run for the Colorado region, for example, I could probably find some and make it available. I probably should not have recommended WRF for the application you're talking about, since it's still a research effort. But it's being used in some of the projects we're involved with, and is probably destined to become the model that reflects the best state-of-the-art for forecasts. We're involved in a multi-organization project named LEAD that runs WRF and archives model results, but I don't think they are made available outside of the project currently. > To make this easier for you maybe, which one would have something like > temperature, pressure, wind direction, wind speed? Having all that in one > dataset would keep me busy for a while. I think they all have surface temperature and surface pressure, but none have wind direction and wind speed explicitly. Instead, they have "u wind" and "v wind" which are the eastward and northward components of wind, respectively, so you have to compute the wind speed and direction from these. Also, most of the parameters are defined at "isobaric levels" such as 500 millibars (also called hectopascals), which means the surface on which the pressure is a constant 500 millibars, so plotting the constant pressure on one of these surfaces would not be very interesting :-). A more interesting parameter might be "relative humidity". > Since you say these are converted from GRIB, does that mean all these models > output GRIB? I thought NetCDF was the most important format for you guys. GRIB is an international standard that's good for data transport, because it emphasizes data compression and it has no language or character-set bias (it's all numbers). Almost all operational models output GRIB if the output will be archived or distributed to other countries. It's the blessed standard of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). But it's not particularly good for analysis and visualization applications to use because it only represents two-dimensional horizontal fields, has no standard API for data access, and requires external centrally-maintained tables for interpreting the meaning of the data. So the GRIB model data is often stitched together into multidimensional netCDF files that have a supported API for data access. (But there are also some applications that can use GRIB data directly, such as GrADS and GEMPAK.) > To download one of these files, do I need a password? I'm getting an error > message "The password was not allowed" when I just try to copy it through > Internet Explorer. Do I need to ftp it? Can't do that from home through the > firewalls right now. Sorry, I didn't remember those files required a password. Since this is being archived in our support system, I'll have to send that in a separate email. > Thanks for the link to the Redbook graphics. Would it be useful or > interesting to the atmospheric community if for example after a WRF run, a > collection of predefined map layers were generated and available as part of > a mapping service on the web where you could combine several layers and > change symbology? Or are the consumers of this data happy with this and > just use it to make value added products? That's a complicated question. Some of the people we work with are more interested in data than pictures, often so they can use the data to create their own web sites with their analyses and forecasts. Also the reason users in the research and education communities need applications like the IDV and GEMPAK to look at the data is that no set of predefined layers can adequately capture the complexity of the atmosphere, address the diverse interests of researchers, or help forecast what will happen as well as being able to interactively explore the data. On the other end of the scale, there are users who are most interested in graphics, and for them a small set of predefined layers might be fine. In the U.S., a commercial weather sector provides such services to various niches of users, such as aviation, agriculture, emergency response organizations, the marine sector, etc. So the set of graphics needed differs for each set of users. I have to emphasize that my area is software engineering, not atmospheric sciences. Other Unidata staff are better qualified to answer some of your questions, but most of them are trying to get ready for the annual AGU meeting in San Francisco next week, which will be followed shortly by the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in which we're quite active. But I'll CC: Jeff Weber also, in case he can correct anything he sees wrong in this reply. --Russ