Alternate access to NCEP data products through NCEP Data Portals

The RDA republishes many NCEP data products.  Users with urgent data needs during extended RDA downtimes may obtain the data directly from NCEP servers.

The 10-day archive of GFS products (including GDAS/FNL analysis grids) can be found at the real-time site http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/gfs/

GDAS data up to ~ 9 months old may be found at this online archive  https://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/data/gdas/ (which may be decommissioned soon.)

THREDDS users can use https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/thredds/model/model.html

Older data can be requested from this long-term archive https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data

Some of the data is available for immediate download.  For example, you can obtain GFS analysis files from ftp://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/GFS/analysis_only/201803/20180315/

Note that data read from tape is organized and delivered in daily (01Jan2001​–21Feb2012) or hourly (13Feb2012-present) tar files that can be very large and include things that you may not need.  For instance, one 6-hourly GDAS tar file is 47 GB and includes the initial hour and all forecast hours for global 0.25, 0.5, and 1.0 degree resolution grids.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/global-data-assimilation-system-gdas

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