NOAA NWC - Irma National Water Model Streamflow Forecasts

The National Water Model (NWM) is a water forecasting model operated by the NOAA National Weather Service that continually forecasts flows on 2.7 million stream reaches covering 3.2 million miles of streams and rivers in the continental United States [1]. It operates as part of the national weather forecasting system, with inputs from NOAA numerical weather prediction models, and from weather and water conditions observed through the US Geological Survey's National Water Information System. Reference materials for the computational framework behind NWM is published by NCAR [9] [10].

The NWC generates NWM streamflow forecasts for the continental US (CONUS) with multiple forecast horizons and time steps. Due to the output file sizes, these are normally not available for download more than a couple days at a time [2]. A 40-day rolling window of these forecasts is maintained by HydroShare at RENCI [3], and a complete retrospective (August 2016 to the present) of the NWM Analysis & Assimilation outputs is maintained as well (contact [e-mail] for access).

An archive of all NWM forecasts for the period Aug 29 to Sept 17, 2017 has been compiled at RENCI [4] [5], available as netCDF (.nc) files totaling 6.8 TB. These can be browsed, subsetted, visualized, and downloaded (see [6] [7] [8]). In addition to these output files, we have uploaded to this HydroShare resource the input parameter files needed to re-run the NWM for the Irma period, or for any time period covered by NWM v1.1 and 1.2 (August 2016 to this publication date in August 2018). These parameter files are also made available at [1].

See README for further details and usage guidance. Please see NOAA contacts listed on [1] for questions about the NWM data contents, structure and formats. Contact [e-mail] if any questions about HydroShare-based tools and data access.

References
[1] Overview of the NWM framework and output files [http://water.noaa.gov/about/nwm]
[2] Free access to all National Water Model output for the most recent two days [ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/nwm]
[3] NWM outputs for rolling 40-day window, maintained by HydroShare [http://thredds.hydroshare.org/thredds/catalog/nwm/catalog.html]
[4] Archived Irma NWM outputs via RENCI THREDDS server [http://thredds.hydroshare.org/thredds/catalog/nwm/irma/catalog.html]
[5] RENCI is an Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
[6] Live map for National Water Model forecasts [http://water.noaa.gov/map]
[7] NWM Forecast Viewer app [https://hs-apps.hydroshare.org/apps/nwm-forecasts]
[8] CUAHSI JupyterHub example scripts for subsetting NWM output files [https://hydroshare.org/resource/3db192783bcb4599bab36d43fc3413db/]
[9] WRF-Hydro Overview [https://ral.ucar.edu/projects/wrf_hydro/overview]
[10] WRF-Hydro User Guide 2013 [https://ral.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/public/images/project/WRF_Hydro_User_Guide_v3.0.pdf]