Effective September 20, 2007 at 1400 UTC – Wind Gust
Element in the National Digital Forecast Database to
be Upgraded to Operational Status for the CONUS, Puerto
Rico and the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and Guam
On September 20, 2007 at 1400 Coordinated Universal Time
(UTC), or midnight September 21 local time in Guam, the Wind
Gust element in the National
Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) will be upgraded to operational
status for the conterminous U.S. (CONUS); the 16 pre-defined
NDFD CONUS subsectors; Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands;
Hawaii; and Guam. Wind gust was added to the NDFD
as an experimental element on September 6, 2006, as announced
in Technical Implementation
Notice (TIN) 06-55.
Wind gust forecasts are issued for three hour periods
out to 72 hours.
With this upgrade to operational status, all of these
elements will be archived by NOAA's National
Climatic Data Center (NCDC). See the NDFD
Access Data web page for information on accessing operational
NDFD elements from NCDC's archive.
As with all NDFD elements, wind gust is accessible in
several ways:
Customers who pull this element for one or more domain(s)
via anonymous ftp, user-defined geographic
areas or points, the FOS' Server Access Service,
or via
http may need to update their procedures and scripts
to continue to receive wind gust elements from NDFD. Detailed
information for ftp and http
users is included below.
Customers who use the NDFD
XML via web service, NDFD
GML via WFS, and/or NDFD
graphical forecasts can use the same methods they
currently use to acquire this element for the domain(s)
of interest, and this change in status will be transparent
to those users. For graphics users, the only change
will be the “experimental” label currently on the wind
gust graphics will be removed on the effective date of
this change. For XML and GML users, there is no
distinction in the data itself between experimental and
operational elements.
Customers who key on the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO) super heading(s) to access NDFD elements, can access
a list of super
headings for the Wind Gust elements (pdf). There
is no change in the WMO super headings with the change
to operational status.
Questions or feedback? Please e-mail nws.ndfd@noaa.gov or complete a Customer Survey:
GRIB2 file users Graphics users NDFD XML users NDFD WFS users
Other useful NDFD web pages:
Instructions for ftp and
http users:
On September 20, 2007 at 1200 UTC, GRIB2 files for the
wind gust element in NDFD will:
- Start being posted to the operational NDFD ftp and
http subdirectories for the CONUS; the 16 pre-defined
NDFD CONUS subsectors; Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands;
Hawaii; and Guam, and
- Cease being posted to the experimental NDFD ftp and
http subdirectories for the same domains
Because the physical location (i.e., URL) of the element
files changes when the status changes from experimental
to operational, partners and customers who access the wind
gust element via anonymous ftp and/or via http may need to update their
procedures and/or scripts to continue to access this element
once it becomes operational.
A specific list of the current (experimental) and future
(operational) subdirectory ftp and http URLs to access
wind gust for the affected domains is shown below. There
will be no overlap of data between the operational subdirectories
and the experimental subdirectories. Once wind
gust element moves to the operational subdirectory on September
20, 2007 at 1400 UTC, no new wind gust files will be posted
in the experimental subdirectory. A few hours after
the wind gust files have successfully posted to the operational
subdirectories, the obsolete wind gust files will be deleted
from the associated experimental subdirectories.
The file name for wind gust element within the subdirectories remains
the same - “ds.wgust.bin”.
NOTE: Since wind gust is
only issued through 72 hours, wind gust forecasts are
not included in the Days 4-7 subdirectory for any of
the NDFD domains.
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