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RE: NCEP North American Reanalysis (fwd)



Hi David, Jon and Dennis,

Your questions are flattering in terms of the assumed breadth and depth of knowledge about data collections here at the Unidata Program Center (UPC), but we should be honest and offer a few clarifications that will help you find what you are looking for more quickly.

The main clarification is that the staff at the UPC mainly focuses on infrastructure for real-time data systems for weather data. I understand that archived climate information is closely related, but your questions about the details of specific archived climate datasets are skirting pretty much at and beyond the edges of our UPC expertise. Those sorts of questions are better posed to the folk who create and maintain the climate data archives at places like the NCDC, NCAR, Lamont-Doherty, and CDC. I plan to send a copy of this note to Glenn Rutledge at NCDC, Benno Blumenthal at LDEO, Steve Worley at NCAR, and Don Hooper & Roland Schweitzer at CDC who should be able to help you find what you need in terms of the North American Reanalysis datasets -- in particular a netCDF version.

On the other hand, we do have experience at the UPC with decoders that transform certain GRIB datasets into netCDF form (indeed with considerably expanded size) and I'll ask Robb to follow up on that issue to see if there is a version of that (GRIBTONC) decoder for the North American Reanalysis data.

I don't mean to be passing the buck, but there are many groups who have more detailed expertise than the UPC about archives of climate datasets.

--Ben
******************************************************
  Ben Domenico                Unidata Deputy Director
  http://my.unidata.ucar.edu            P.O. Box 3000
  address@hidden              Boulder, CO 80307
  (303)497-8631                    FAX: (303)497-8690

--On Thursday, September 30, 2004 3:45 PM -0500 David Maidment <address@hidden> wrote:

Robb:

Dennis Lettenmaier is correct here.  What you are pointing us to is
the global NCEP reanalysis, which is on a 2.5 degree grid and not
very informative for the hydrology of the US.  What we are seeking
to work with is the reanalysis for North America alone, which is
on a 32km grid and is in Grib format, not netCDF.   The global
reanalysis is available in netCDF.

David


-----Original Message-----
From: Robb Kambic [mailto:address@hidden]
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2004 11:25 AM
To: Ben Domenico
Cc: David Maidment; support-ldm
Subject: Re: NCEP North American Reanalysis (fwd)



look at url:

http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cdc/data.ncep.reanalysis.html#surface_gauss

parameters  water runoff, soil moisture, etc.  these files are in netcdf
so they should be usuable for your analysis. i downloaded a couple of
files and dumped them using ncdump.

there are proably other hydrologic fluxes data sets that can be found by
searching the web.

robb...

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Ben Domenico wrote:

Hi all,

The note below from David Maidment asks about getting the NCAR
reanalysis products into netCDF form.  Is there something special
about these datasets or would our grib to netcdf decoder work with
them.  Regarding the grads part of it, I'm assuming that refers to the

fact that they are available via the GDS protocol, but let me know if
there's more to it than that.

And how about the CDC archives?  I thought they published these data
in netCDF form.

Thanks.

-- Ben

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Thursday, September 30, 2004 8:18 AM -0500
From: David Maidment <address@hidden>
To: Ben Domenico <address@hidden>
Subject: NCEP North American Reanalysis


Ben:

In CUAHSI HIS, we are thinking that a good "coverage" of hydrologic
fluxes from the atmosphere could be obtained from the NCEP North
American Reanalysis. More info is at
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/mmb/rreanl/

It seems like the data are all stored in one of your sister
institutions in Boulder.

Could you please help us to interpret what the data available are?

The data are in Grib/Grads format.   We have invested a lot of effort
in
working
with netCDF and I don't want Jon Goodall or others in our CUAHSI
community
having to tussle with Grib/Grads.   We have another other data formats
already
with GIS, point observations and remote sensing to consider.

Would it be possible to translate these reanalysis data layers into
netCDF format?

David


---------- End Forwarded Message ----------




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Robb Kambic                                Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer III                      Univ. Corp for Atmospheric
Research
address@hidden             WWW:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
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