Project Information

The Surface Fluxes Analysis (SurFA) project is initiated by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Working Groups on Numerical Experimentation and on the Surface Fluxes (WGNE and WGSF), Observation & Assimilation Panel (WOAP), and the Ocean Observation Panel for Climate (OOPC). The SurFA objective is to evaluate the performance of operational global Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) forecast variables used in computing surface fluxes such as surface winds. To facilitate the evaluation and monitoring of weather and climate model forecast skills and satellite-based products against high quality in-situ observations, a data repository for collocated model forecasts and in-situ observations has been established at the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC; www.ncdc.noaa.gov/thredds/surfa.html), one of the data centers for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s satellite and other climate data.

SPEC is a satellite product evaluation system that is developed at NCDC and designed to facilitate the integrated operational monitoring of NOAA's satellite and modeling systems and products. Currently, it has the capability of ingesting data of various types via various data servers, co-locating fields in time and space of various data formats, and providing users with the Network Common Data Format (NetCDF), and basic analysis and visualization functionality.

A near real-time product quality monitoring system prototype has been developed utilizing the existing capability and functionality of SPEC and the SurFA datasets including high-quality observations to monitor the performance of NWP short-range forecast winds and satellite-derived winds by identifying potential outliers in near real-time and in an automatic fashion. This web-based interface utilizes the functionality of the geographic information system (GIS) to enhance the user experience of visualizing the output from the SPEC statistical analysis tool.

Download Files

Select the ending date from the drop-down list below (grayed out dates are not available) to download a tar-gzipped file that includes images of time series and tabulated statistical values for all stations and an index.html file that will display all these information in a html view along with additional data quality alerts based on pre-determined criteria. The statistical values for all stations are also included in both csv and xml formats.

User Registration Form

Access to the CICS-NC/NCDC SurFA-SPEC-GIS Near Real-Time Product Quality Monitoring System is Unrestricted, but users are encouraged ro register to sign up for daily e-mail notification and receive e-mail notification of updates and corrections.

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Disclaimer of Liability and Availability

This web-based near real-time product quality monitoring system is provided as a prototype for our collaborators, developed jointly by researchers and developers at Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites - NC (CICS-NC) and NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). While researchers at CICS-NC and NCDC strive to make the information on this website as timely and accurate as possible, there is no guarantee on their future availability. No claims, promises, or guarantees are made about the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of the contents of this site.