Folder structure NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) Model unclear

[motorreiziger]

Can someone pls expand the short names or what attributes/parameters these folders stand for? I could not find any documentation on NOAA website or at UniData.

[jmilloy]

I wrote the GFS data nodes, and I didn't find documentation for this either. For our gfs example notebook I made guesses based on the folder name, and I selected folders I thought I could make a good guess for.

[jmilloy]

For easy reference, here is the browsable bucket with the folders in question

http://awsopendata.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/noaa-gfs/#

[motorreiziger]

Thanks for writing the GFS Data Nodes! the folder structure does not match the Grib reference:
https://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb//docs/on388/table2.html
I will contact the NOAA about the documentation. If have found it, I'll let you know

[motorreiziger]

I contacted the Unidata support and they helped me a little bit with their anwser:
So those parameters in the folder structure are what's present in the LDM feed. Those abbreviations come from one of a set of table files you can find here:

https://github.com/Unidata/LDM/tree/master/gempak/tables

I'm not sure which one is exactly appropriate for the GFS data, but you should be able to search for various abbreviations in those files and find a longer description.

But it is not a complete answer, e.g. if I need total Precipation , I have to look at the P__M parameter, but which one? and what do the numbers like 03 and 06 meand behind the folder names? THe dataset AWS offers seem a little useless to me. Maybe you need the unidata LDM application....

[mpu-creare]

We all struggle with documentation it seems!

I believe the __ in P__M corresponds to day of the year -- if that helps.

[phanicode]

@jmilloy your gfs example notebook link is dead. Has it been removed or simply moved to another repo/folder?

Dead link: https://github.com/creare-com/podpac-examples/blob/master/notebooks/demos/gfs.ipynb

[mpu-creare]

@phanicode Moved to here: https://github.com/creare-com/podpac-examples/blob/main/notebooks/5-datalib/gfs.ipynb