Radar Data in the NOAA Big Data Project

The NOAA Big Data Project (BDP) is an innovative approach to publishing NOAA’s vast data resources and positioning them near cost-efficient high-performance computing, analytic, and storage services provided by the private sector. This collaboration combines three powerful resources—NOAA’s tremendous volume of high-quality environmental data and advanced data products, private industry’s vast infrastructure and technical capacity, and the American economy’s innovation and energy—to create a sustainable, market-driven ecosystem that lowers the cost barrier to data publication. Please refer to the NOAA Big Data Project summary for more information.

Through cooperative activities as a part of NOAA’s Big Data Project, NEXRAD data are now freely available through the following cloud infrastructures.

NCEI releases the NOAA NEXRAD archive inventory as a reference for users in support of the BDP efforts. The inventory contains comma separated (CSV) text files listing the original archive files (in tar format) and the individual volume scans present inside the tar files. Example scripts showing how to automate the listing, access and conversion files are available.

Amazon Web Services

The full historical archive of NEXRAD Level-II data is available for direct download from the Amazon S3 storage or direct access from within the Amazon computing environment.

Amazon Documentation
Amazon Blog
NCEI News Release
Example scripts (list, download, convert)

Open Commons Consortium

The full historical archive of NEXRAD Level-II data is available for direct download from the Open Commons Consortium (OCC) Environmental Data Commons.

OCC Documentation
OCC Announcement

NCEI releases the NOAA NEXRAD archive inventory as a reference for users in support of the BDP efforts. The inventory contains comma separated (CSV) text files listing the original archive files (in tar format) and the individual volume scan files present inside the tar files.