Historical weather data from the Global Forecast System (GFS) model operated by NOAA NCEP, transformed into zarr format by dynamical.org.
URL: https://data.dynamical.org/noaa/gfs/analysis-hourly/latest.zarr?email=optional@email.com
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The Global Forecast System (GFS) is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) weather forecast model that generates data for dozens of atmospheric and land-soil variables, including temperatures, winds, precipitation, soil moisture, and atmospheric ozone concentration. The system couples four separate models (atmosphere, ocean model, land/soil model, and sea ice) that work together to depict weather conditions.
This dataset is an "analysis" containing the model's best estimate of each value at each timestep. In other words, it does not contain a forecast dimension. GFS starts a new model run every 6 hours and dynamical.org has created this analysis by concatenating the first 6 hours of each forecast. Before 2021-02-27 GFS had a 3 hourly step at early forecast hours. In this reanalysis we have used linear interpolation in the time dimension to fill in the two timesteps between the three-hourly values prior to 2021-02-27.
The data values in this dataset have been rounded in their binary representation to improve compression. We round to retain 9 bits of the floating point number's mantissa (a 10 digit significand) which creates a maximum of 0.2% difference between the original and rounded value. See Klöwer et al. 2021 for more information.
A hearty thank you to Source Cooperative for hosting this dataset.