+ The Global Forecast System (GFS) is a weather forecast model produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). Dozens of atmospheric and land-soil variables are available through this dataset, from temperatures, winds, and precipitation to soil moisture and atmospheric ozone concentration. The GFS data files stored here can be immediately used for [OAR/ARL’s NOAA-EPA Atmosphere-Chemistry Coupler Cloud (NACC-Cloud) tool](https://www.arl.noaa.gov/research/surface-atmosphere-exchange-home/tools-and-products/nacc-nacc-cloud/), and are in a Network Common Data Form (netCDF), which is a very common format used across the scientific community. These particular GFS files contain a comprehensive number of global atmosphere/land variables at a relatively high spatiotemporal resolution (~13x13 km horizontal, vertical resolution of 127 levels, and hourly), are not only necessary for the NACC-Cloud tool to adequately drive community air quality applications (e.g., U.S. EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality model; https://www.epa.gov/cmaq), but can be very useful for a myriad of other applications in the Earth system modeling communities (e.g., atmosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere, etc.). While many other data file and record formats are indeed available for Earth system and climate research (e.g., GRIB, HDF, GeoTIFF), the netCDF files here are advantageous to the larger community because of the comprehensive, high spatiotemporal information they contain, and because they are more scalable, appendable, shareable, self-describing, and community-friendly (i.e., many tools available to the community of users). Out of the four operational GFS forecast cycles per day (at 00Z, 06Z, 12Z and 18Z) this particular netCDF dataset is updated daily (/yyyymmdd) for the 12Z cycle and includes 24-hr output for both 2D (gfs.t12z.sfcf$0hh.nc) and 3D variables (gfs.t12z.atmf$0hh.nc).
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