On April 1, 1995, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) began routine generation of N. America analysis and forecast fields. This new "Early Eta" system became operational on 12Z 12 Oct 1995, and output from this operational system began to populate the CPPA/GAPP tape archive on 00Z 1 Nov 95 (prior to 1 Nov 95 the tape archive was populated by the output from the pre-implementation version of the same model). The output files include A) gridded 3-D and 2-D atmospheric fields of wind velocity, temperature, humidity, and cloud water, as well as a whole host of surface, sub-surface, and near surface fields and B) hourly time series output at a large set of selected sites (about 600) over N. America. On June 20, 2006, Eta was replaced by the nonhydrostatic WRF-NMM as the NCEP mesoscale operational model.

Noah LSM Related Publications:

NCEP OHD CPPA/GAPP Core Project Related Publications:

Noah Community LSM model:

• User's Guide and Execution Tutorial
  • html
  • MS Word document
• Source code and 1-year continued-run script

NAM/NDAS Output Fields (contents, format, grid specs, output frequency, archive):

• The NWP model
• The horizontal output grid
• The vertical grid
• Access to fields
  • Anonymous FTP Access
  • Permanent Tape Archive
• Contents of the 2D/3D gridded fields
• The hourly station profiles output (molts)
• GRIB unpacking
• BUFR unpacking

Problems and fixes:

• Correction of wind rotation error (Prior to 1 Aug 1995)

Surface fields (snow, surface type, albedo, vegetation type, greenness fraction):

• README file about the fields
• ftp://ftp.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/mmb/gcp/sfcflds directory
• Greenness fraction
• 4-season snowfree albedo
• New albedos (testing)
• Vegetation types
• Soil texture
• Images of Snow files:
  • NAM snow page
  • The NESDIS/IMS snow/ice images
  • On Hua-Lu Pan's home page (EMC/NCEP)
  • On the NCAR/RAP Weather Data Page

• Related soil moisture web sites
  • NCEP/NASA NDAS
  • CPC Soil Moisture Monitoring and Prediction

NCEP Near-surface and Surface NAM/NDAS Verification

• Monthly 2m and 10m NAM Verification Stats
• NAM Daily Verification at Selected Surface Stations

• Precipitation observations/forecast verification
  • NCEP Hourly precipitation analyses (Stage II and Stage IV)
  • Daily Observed vs. Forecast 24h Precipitation Plots
  • QPF Verfication Scores
  • Monthly Precipitation/Water Budget Maps
  • CPC 30- and 90-day Precipitation Images

• GOES verification of NAM fields (skin temperature, insolation, total cloud amount)
  • CONUS Maps
  • Scatter plots

• Log of missed NDAS cycles since 1 Apr 1995
• Log of NAM model code changes
• Log of NAM model test runs

NCEP CPPA/GAPP/GEWEX related information and fields are also available via anonymous ftp at ftp.ncep.noaa.gov :

• /pub/gcp/eta
• /pub/gcp/edas
• /pub/gcp/sfcflds