Background information about this type of data may be found in An Introduction to Atmospheric and Oceanographic Datasets.

As with any high volume operational model production system there were times when late file postings and network outages interrupted data acquisition and processing for the archive. The CISL/DSS made a "best" effort to obtain a complete archive time series.

CISL/DSS selects the FNL analysis over all others because it uses the most complete set of observations and is run last in the sequence of operational global models. The FNL is likely the best option for a long-term operational model archive from NCEP. Note that NCEP also made forecasts using the same model, but DSS did not collect them.

The CISL/DSS FNL files originated as downloads of the near-real time analysis files on the NCEP file server, from the pub/data/nccf/com/gfs/prod/gfs.[date] directories, where date has the form yyyymmdd , and the files are named gfs.thhz.pgrbf00.grib2 where hh is the analysis time and f00 indicates an analysis. pgrb files with other fnn values are forecasts nn hours into the future. Numerous other files are in these directories. The NCEP directories are emptied after about 30 hours, and aged off after about 48 hours.

Land skin temperature and sea surface temperature are in one field.

A memo about SST analysis is here.

1000mb 975mb 925mb 900mb 850mb 800mb 700mb 650mb 600mb 550mb 500mb 450mb 400mb 350mb 300mb 250mb 200mb 150mb 100mb 70mb 50mb 30mb 20mb 10mb

surface upper-air troposphere mandatory tropopause stratosphere sigma

For higher levels (70 to 0.4mb), which are on polar grids, please see DS067.3. For higher levels (5 to 0.4mb), which are on polar grids, please see DS067.4.

Updated 22 July 2005