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Tadd Bindas

  • 3 min read

Coding Blog: How to access NWM forcings using VirtualiZarr

One of the most underrated aspects of NOAA's weather data is how much data is published on a daily basis. The National Water Model (Cosgrove et al. 2024) produces nine total operational configurations, each with a different look back peroid, forecast range, and domain extent. The number of .nc files output to S3 Object Storage is in the tens of thousands... per day!

While this amount of data is monumental for machine learning, or other hydrological analysis, it's cumbersome to read every .nc file individually, or download this amount of data to disk. That is where VirtualiZarr comes into play as it allows existing .nc files / structures to be viewed as zarr stores/xarray datasets without having to duplicate any data!

Below is a tutorial on how you can use VirtualiZarr to read a forecast from the National Water Model as a singular zarr store for your own studies

  • 9 min read

The Technical side of AGU 2024: What happened and where are we going

Two weeks ago, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) hosted its annual fall meeting in Washington, D.C., with over 25,000 attendees from 100+ countries present to share their research. For those reading who have not been, nor heard of AGU, there are four major themes present:

  • Earth's subsurface
  • Earth's surface
  • The atmosphere
  • Space

Among these four themes, there are several sections, and within each section there are many sessions corresponding to a research topic proposed by a group of scientists. Generally, most scientists submit one abstract to their field of study, and rarely, a second to a different section. At the conference research conversations occurred at posters, sessions, and oddly timed coffee hours during the lulls in programming (had to get my yearly zinger at AGU's coffee policy). Now that my brain, and feet from the 20,000 daily steps, have recovered, I want to write about my most significant takeaway from the week and where I predict things will be headed next year.