North American Regional Reanalysis Homepage

Welcome to the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) Homepage! Here you will see all sorts of information regarding the NARR and some of the results. Currently under construction.

Please read the disclaimer.
Please read the privacy and collection of information policy for this website.

Updated 1:00 pm EDT 12 July 2007

NARR DATA AVAILABLE AT NCDC! ALL YEARS 1979-present!! Click here to download data.

Data also available at NCAR. Click here to get data from there. Note that there is a 1/2 month delay before files are available.

NARR Questions and Answers (updated 27 April 2015)

Have a question about NARR? Click here to see if your question can be answered before you contact us.

Click here for latest updates of presentations and documents.

ALERT: MOLTS not available

MOLTS is Model Output Location Time Series. They are files that contain hourly model soundings interpolated to stations. They are BUFR files.

Unfortunately the MOLTS files were not properly created during the execution of the NARR. As a result they are not available, and there are no plans currently to create new files. We apologize for any problems this may have caused.

Sample Downloading Script for NARR data at NCDC

Click here for a sample script for downloading the data at NCDC.
Click here for a guide and another script for downloading the data at NCDC.
Click here for a pdf file that contains the entire list of variables in the files.

North American Regional Reanalysis Workshop

On 11 January 2005, as part of the 85th AMS Annual Meeting, the North American Regional Reanalysis Workshop was held, with presentations from NCEP scientists as well as NARR users. Below is a list of presentations by NCEP scientists, all in Power Point format.

NARR summary and results
Input observations into NARR. Includes information about precipitation.
Land-surface model in NARR. Includes some important results that pertain to land-surface issues.
NARR Climatologies
User issues. Includes important information as to how to download data and read it.

Below is a list of presentations presented by users of the NARR at the NARR Workshop. Format noted.

Assessment of energy and water budgets in pdf format.
NARR data at NCAR in Power Point format.
Comparison of NARR, ERA40, and observations at Hudson Bay, in Power Point format.
Water budgets in Canada in Power Point format.
Part 2 of above /a>
Moisture fluxes in NAME region warm season' in Power Point format.
Climatological ET vs. NARR in Canada' in PNG format.
Impact of NARR on Regional Climate simulation with Eta in Power Point format.

NARR Climatologies

North American Regional Reanalysis climatologies are now available, courtesy of the Climate Prediction Center. For more information regarding the climatologies, click one of the following:

Information on the climatologies, MS Word format
Climatology summary, MS Power Point format
Information on the climatologies, text format
List of variables in climatologies, MS Excel format

The climatologies are archived on UCAR's CISL Research Data Archive system. Three climatologies are available:

NARR Fixed Field Files

For the land-sea mask and the latitude and longitude of our grids, as well as other fixed-fields in the NARR, in GRIB format, RIGHT click with your mouse below.

After saving these files, if you would like to plot these fields using GrADS, plase use this control file. Note that you can only use this control file on the AWIP32.fixed file.

NARR Production Plots and Files

Updated on 18 November 2004! Data is now available at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)! Click here.

Files are now available! Only daily tar files are now available.

To get a data plot of any variable in the NARR files, click here. Maps, time series, or other plots can be created and downloaded.

Continue to check back to this site frequently for updates. Data is continually being downloaded to the nomad4 server.

What data are on these files? There are two files for each 3-hr time period. Scroll down and click on the sample.a.ctl and the sample.b.ctl files for a list of what is available. These files also serve as GrADS control files should you wish to make plots of the grib files.

The main file (the "a" file, though there is no "a" in the file name) contains the complete archive of all analysis variables valid at the time indicated in the filename. In addition, the "a" file has 3-hr accumulations (e.g. precipitation) and averages (e.g. sensible and latent heat fluxes).

The "b" file contains the instantaneous values of items that were averaged in the "a" file, such as the heat fluxes.

This file here lists the contents of the "merged" files. Note that this is an inventory of our "original" merged files, and the content and organization of files at the two archiving centers differ.

We are in the process of moving the data from our Mass Storage system here at NCEP to our data centers at NCAR, NCDC, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. That effort is ongoing, since it is a very large dataset that we have to move. When the entire 24-year dataset is available, we will let users know.

To inquire about receiving NARR data, send an email to Fedor Mesinger.

NARR Team Members

Click here to see the NARR team members.

NARR Production System Design

We ran the NARR on an IBM-SP. To keep production on schedule, the NARR was divided into four streams. Here is the time frame of each stream:

Stream 1: 1 Oct 1978-31 Dec 1985
Stream 2: 1 Oct 1984-31 Dec 1991
Stream 3: 1 Oct 1990-31 Dec 1997
Stream 4: 1 Oct 1996-31 Dec 2003

Note that there is at least 15 months of overlap between streams. That is due to spin-up issues.

North American Regional Reanalysis CD-ROM

Many of you received a CD-ROM at the 84th AMS Annual Meeting in January 2004 in Seattle, WA. Here is a list of the contents of that CD-ROM.

A README file explaining what is on the CD.
Preprints of the talks/posters presented at the 84th AMS Annual Meeting. The same preprints are presented below.
A description of the NARR output, including a comprehensive list of available variables and the volume size. The same description can also be found here. This is a pdf file.
24 years of plots, in PNG format. The plots are mean sea-level pressure, 500-mb heights and temperatures, and precipitation.
Click here for a list of corrections that were discovered and noted after the CD had been made and distributed.

Eta 32-km/45-layer topography for NARR Production Runs

Here is the topography for the production runs. The plot is courtesy of Matt Pyle of EMC.

Previous Update and Conference Presentations

North American Regional Reanalysis Update (updated 19 August 2005)
- Power Point format
- NARR paper submitted to the Bulletin of the AMS (in PDF format)
- Updates presented at the following conferences
  - AMS Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL, January 2002
  - Mississippi River Climate and Hydrology Conference, New Orleans, LA, May 2002
  - AMS Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA, February 2003
  - Climate Diagnostics Workshop, Reno, NV, October 2003
  - AMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, January 2004
  - NARR Workshop, AMS Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, January 2005
AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA, in January 2004 (all presentations in pdf unless indicated otherwise)
- NARR update
- Input data used in NARR (update 12 June 2006), in MS Word Format
- Data archiving and distribution
- Some forecasts using NARR data
- NARR land/surface results, in Power point format
Climate Diagnostics Workshop in Reno, NV, in October 2003
- Power point format
AMS Annual Meeting in Long Beach, CA, in Feburary 2003
- html format, best viewed with Internet Explorer
- pdf format

Links

Email comments to Perry Shafran, administrator of this web page.