It's Spring and unlike hobbits (I'm reading LOTR), who would be thinking about gardens and second breakfast and whether Farmer Maggot's mushroom crop will come in early, we are staring at grib files. Just kidding, we are walking outside enjoying the warm weather ... while talking on the phone about grib files.
We've been busy with a whole load of updates.
Our old noaa-gfs-analysis-hourly was our "Hello World" — 4 variables, static, Zarr v2.
It has been given a lovely retirement party and replaced with the new GFS analysis.
| Spatial domain | Global |
| Spatial resolution | 0.25° |
| Time resolution | 1 hour |
Four more sweet years. High Resolution Rapid Refresh has been retroactively retained through repeated re-retrieval - and now, re-released for a more uh... robust retrospective.
It previously started in 2018 and now reaches back to 2014. The early years (HRRR v1/v2 era) have more missing source files — NaN values where data are unavailable — but that's the archaeology tax.
Icechunk note: we've updated to v0.2.0. Please point your code at noaa-hrrr-analysis/v0.2.0.icechunk/. We'll be stopping updates to v0.1.0 on 2026-03-19 and removing the archive after that.
By popular demand we've been adding variables to existing datasets. ECMWF, GEFS, and HRRR have all received new variables recently. We drew the line at will_the_sports_be_cancelled_2m and ideal_dog_walk_surface but almost everything else is in there. Check the catalog pages for the full list.
I tried (and tried [and tried]) to find a good [citation needed] open source of obs once ISD was decomissioned and GHCNh made me want to cry enough tears to register on the precip gauge. Alas.
Those tireless little weather stations at airports across the US are available as a GeoParquet dataset. 1940ish to present. This is our first non-model dataset and it's 100% experimental, but it updates every hour and it's what the scorecard is built on.
As a first step towards cloud-optimized ICON-EU Zarrs, we've started archiving DWD's gribs on Source Coop — DWD only maintains a short rolling window on their servers, so someone had to hoard them. Data hoarding is our North Star!
Big thanks to Jack Kelly of Open Climate Fix for leading this effort and to the Patrick J McGovern Foundation for supporting the work.
Enjoy the weather
MM