HRRR, every hour: the 18 hour virtual dataset is live
HRRR wakes up every hour, on the hour, and runs a fresh forecast over the whole of CONUS at 3 km. Four times a day it keeps going out to 48 hours; the other twenty times it stops at 18. Until now we only shipped the four.
noaa-hrrr-forecast-18-hour-virtual is now available
noaa-hrrr-forecast-18-hour-virtual is the hourly companion to the 48 hour virtual dataset we released in July. That one carries only the 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC runs — the ones long enough to reach 48 hours. This one carries every initialization, stepping hourly out to 18 hours. If you want the freshest HRRR forecast at any given moment, this is the one to read.
Like its 48 hour sibling, it's virtual, low-latency, and optimized for spatial (map) access: all 176 variables, 50 model levels and the pressure levels, stored on HRRR's native Lambert Conformal Conic grid with spatial indexing along x and y. The archive runs from 2018-07-13 to the present.
Reading it needs dynamical-catalog>=0.7.0 (or zarr>=3.2, icechunk>=2.0, and gribberish>=1.5). The notebook shows how to use the embedded spatial reference to pull out an area of interest.
Enjoy the weather -- MM