DATA RETRIEVAL SERVICES

Access Purpose

The United States National Weather Service makes many of our warnings, advisories, forecast products, and observations available to the Internet audience on web and file servers. This is to give as wide an avilability as possible to these data and products to those interested in the meteorological and hydrological information. The NWS provides other globally received data and products and will continue to add more to the servers over time. The Universal Coordinated Time, commonly referred to as UTC, is important to understand when using hydrometeorological data. Please review our page on UTC.

The File servers services at the NWS Gateway provide NWS computer generated forecast products and observational data in WMO message code format as received for download (using the standard anonymous FTP protocol). As a Member of WMO, the United States National Weather Service has data and products received from international sources. Some United States international agreements contain special conditions placed by some countries on the use of some data and products . As the United States National Weather Service has global communication circuits, some of these data and computer derived products with conditions are available on our servers. Please go to the section on Additional Data and Products for details on this retreival process. The gridded forecast fields are not human readable products and must be computer processed before use. Many files of alphanumeric products available are on the File server in flat-ASCII files. WMO messages are combined in files (beginning with their abbreviated heading) by using a flag field between each message. This "flag field" is defined in detail on our file server naming practices web page.

NOTE: The Web servers (data servers) may be viewed with any interactive Web browser. The various NWS web servers (sites) are located at local state forecast offices and/or central forecast facilities around the U.S. or at the NWS Gateway. (see our homepage)