NOAA UFS GEFSv13 Replay: Global Weather and Ocean Forecasts at ¼ Degree

NOAA's Unified Forecast System (UFS) Global Ensemble Forecast System version 13 (GEFSv13) Replay dataset provides retrospective global forecasts for atmospheric and oceanic variables like temperature, humidity, winds, salinity, and currents. The dataset was generated by replaying the coupled UFS model against ERA5 atmospheric and ORAS5 ocean reanalyses, with land and sea-ice data assimilated from observational sources. It covers January 1994 to October 2023 at a nominal ¼ degree horizontal resolution and is hosted on AWS and GCP cloud services.

Use Cases

• Training machine learning models for weather forecasting based on global atmospheric variables.
• Analyzing long-term climate trends based on the 1994-2023 retrospective forecast archive.
• Studying ocean-atmosphere coupling dynamics based on the model's computed cross-component fluxes.
• Developing data assimilation techniques based on the integration of snow depth and sea-ice observations.

Strengths

• Covers a significant time range from January 1994 to October 2023.
• Provides global coverage at a nominal horizontal resolution of ¼ degree.
• Integrates multiple model components, including a 25 km atmospheric dynamical core and a ¼ degree ocean model.
• Data is hosted on major cloud platforms (AWS and GCP) for accessibility.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

Collection Method

Generated by replaying the coupled UFS model against pre-existing ERA5 and ORAS5 reanalyses, with observational data assimilation for land and sea-ice.

Time Range

January 1994 to October 2023.

Freshness

Plans for ongoing updates are mentioned, but last update date is unknown.

Geography

Global.