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University of Washington Mesoscale Ensemble Data
Archive
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The University of Washington's Atmospheric Sciences
department runs NCAR's mm5 mesoscale
forecast system over the Pacific Northwest region of the United
States. The mm5 model is run several times each day, with different
initialisations. The ensemble
of results are then saved to disk.
The Applied Physics Laboratory maintains an archive of the model data,
from 2000 up to the present. As of May 2006, the archive totals
~3TB of data, stored in the native mmout
(v3) file format.
This site supports user manipulation of the archived data. The
following operations are currently supported:
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Data View : Select and view
individual field values, based upon model, geographic area,
initialisation date/hour, field name and forecast hour. The values
are formatted as text, with user-defined value delimiters. Use your
browser's SaveAs option to save the data.
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Image View:
Select and view images of individual field values. This feature is
accessed by the same form as for Data View, see above.
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Netcdf Download: Select and download
netcdf files, converted from the native mm5 files. Each netcdf file
contains an entire model run. The files are large for web-based
transmission, up to 70MB. The netcdf feature is accessed via its
own form.
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MM5v3 tools:
Download some Java-based tools useful in parsing/viewing sections of
an mmout file. Includes BigHeader viewer, SubHeader list viewer and
field viewer. The tools can access local files, or data in this
archive directly. The tools are bundled in zip format.
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mm5v3-netcdf
converter: Download the tool which we use for the netcdf
conversion. Note that at this time, the converter best handles mm5
files from this archive. Other mm5out files may not convert
correctly.
If you encounter any problems, please contact
the archive maintainer. The help page
describes further the features noted here.