Advances to the NOAA Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)

The NCDC NOMADS distributed data access system has been in operations 15 years serving the community historical and real-time NWP model input and output and climate model output to a variety of users. At NCDC NOMADS provides nearly 1PB of data each year with an ever increasing number of user downloads provided (170 million in 2014). Given this growth, the NCDC NOMADS team are implementing improvements to allow additional concurrent users, and advance the paradigm that users can obtain the information they need without downloading massive amounts of data. New architecture improvements include a virtualized machine (VM) hosting environment and improved sub-setting capabilities through pre-aggregation of variables; on-line RESTful-based tools; and new approaches to off-line tape ordering systems. This paper will explore these improvements and applications that include the NCDC-NCEP “Ensemble Probability Tool (EPT) that provides high-impact weather information from NCEP's Global Ensemble Forecasting System (GEFS); support the WMO THORPEX International Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE); the NWS National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) suite of forecast products; and a new Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data access node. Further, advances to the Ocean-NOMADS capability at the National Ocean Data Center (NODC) and the NWS NOMADS systems will also be detailed.