NOAA Next General Weather Radar (NEXRAD) Level II Data

The Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) networks 160 Doppler radar sites throughout the United States and select overseas locations detecting precipitation and atmospheric movement. Level-II data include the original three meteorological base data quantities: reflectivity, mean radial velocity, and spectrum width, as well as the dual-polarization base data of differential reflectivity, correlation coefficient, and differential phase. NEXRAD Level II data is in the .GZ binary format specific to the NEXRAD project. The archives run June 1991 to present.
Data is made available to the research community as part of the Open Common Consortium's collaboration with NOAA. For more information visit the NOAA Nexrad site.

Source: https://data.noaa.gov/dataset/noaa-next-generation-radar-nexrad-level-ii-base-data

Keywords: earth science

Size: ~500TiB

Identifiers:

ark:/31807/osdc-658ab6b1

Last Updated: New Level II data is added and indexed as soon as it is made available. UTC

OSDC Instructions

Virtual machines on the OSDC have direct access to all of the public data sets. If you do not have a OSDC account, you can apply for one here.

OSDC Allocation Recipients:

For OSDC allocation recipients trying to access public data from either a PDC or Public resource, data is located in either /glusterfs/osdc_public_data or in the griffin-objstore.opensciencedatacloud.org. We recommend reviewing the Access Instructions above for particulars.

License/Attribution Requirements

There are no restrictions on the use of this data as part of the Open Commons Consortium's collaboration with NOAA. NOAA’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for this data is: doi:10.7289/V5W9574V. More information on NEXRAD data citation and terms of use is available from NOAA.

Nexrad Level II Search Service

Using this service, you can search space and time for NEXRAD level II data of interest. This search service will return persistent digital identifiers for accessing data from given NEXRAD Radar Stations and given dates in time.

These digital identifiers can then be used to locate the data of interest via the OSDC Signpost ID service 'alias' endpoint. The digital identifiers map to hashes of the identified data objects, which then map to known locations (urls) of the identified data. For an example of how to use the Signpost ID service for finding NEXRAD data, see here.

Referring to digital identifiers and the Signpost ID service instead of hard coding locations of data ensures that any code that interfaces with data in the commons will run smoothly if the data need to be moved. The goal in practice is a system in which a commons serving the research community can relocate data files to another commons and no researcher needs to change their code.

To use the search tool, provide a start date and end date of interest in format 'mm/dd/yyyy', the maximum range it supports for query is 7 days. A full list of stations/station codes can be found here.