Every February 2, we anxiously await groundhog Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction of spring’s arrival, but how accurate is he?
The Global Forecast System (GFS) is a National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) weather forecast model that generates data for dozens of atmospheric and land-soil variables, including temperatures, winds, precipitation, soil moisture, and atmospheric ozone concentration. The system
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck off the northeast coast of Honshu, Japan, generating a deadly tsunami.
2025 ranked as the third-warmest year in NOAA’s 176-year record, with a global surface temperature 2.11°F (1.17°C) higher than the 20th-century baseline.
The World Magnetic Model (WMM) is the standard model for navigation, attitude, and heading referencing systems that use the geomagnetic field. The WMM is also used for civilian applications, including navigation and heading systems. A new version of the model is updated every five years to address
Learn about the legacy of Dr. George Washington Carver, one of the prominent Black scientists of the early 20th century.
The U.S. Climate Normals are a large suite of data products that provide information about typical climate conditions for thousands of locations across the United States. Normals act both as a ruler to compare today’s weather and tomorrow’s forecast, and as a predictor of conditions in the near
Though climate and weather are closely related, they aren't the same thing. The main difference between the two is time.
The Global Historical Climatology Network daily (GHCNd) is an integrated database of daily climate summaries from land surface stations across the globe. GHCNd is made up of daily climate records from numerous sources that have been integrated and subjected to a common suite of quality assurance
The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) project is the most complete global collection of tropical cyclones available. It merges recent and historical tropical cyclone data from multiple agencies to create a unified, publicly available, best-track dataset that improves
Learn about how and why the geomagnetic poles move, and access pole location data from 1590–2025.
The National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) uses the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) to interpolate data from a variety of observing systems and instruments onto a three-dimensional grid. NCEI provides access to this gridded output data, which is used to initialize the NCEP Global
The ETOPO Global Relief Model integrates topography, bathymetry, and shoreline data from regional and global datasets to enable comprehensive, high resolution renderings of geophysical characteristics of the earth’s surface. The model is designed to support tsunami forecasting, modeling, and warning
The Integrated Surface Database (ISD) is a global database that consists of hourly and synoptic surface observations compiled from numerous sources into a single common ASCII format and common data model. ISD integrates data from more than 100 original data sources, including numerous data formats