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NOAA NAM datasets now available

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namawphys namawip12 namconusnest namgoes218

GribStream now supports NOAA NAM awphys, awip12, conusnest.hiresf, and goes218 for CONUS, with history back to September 16, 2021.

On March 17, 2026, we added four NOAA North American Mesoscale (NAM) CONUS datasets to GribStream.

We kept getting requests for NAM specifically. That makes sense: even with RRFS positioned as NOAA's successor path, NAM is still operational today, still widely referenced in regional workflows, and still exposes variables that are hard to replace with any single newer model.

What is included

  • NAM CONUS Upper Air (namawphys, NOAA awphys): the 12 km CONUS upper-air and regional forecast slice.
  • NAM CONUS Surface Diagnostics (namawip12, NOAA awip12): the 12 km CONUS companion with a much broader surface, soil, canopy, radiation, and column-diagnostic inventory.
  • NAM CONUS Nest (namconusnest, NOAA conusnest.hiresf): the 3 km fixed CONUS nest for convection-allowing regional workflows.
  • NAM CONUS GOES-Simulated Brightness Temperatures (namgoes218, NOAA goes218): the simulated-satellite slice with GOES brightness temperatures on the CONUS NAM grid.

All four are available through the standard GribStream API as JSON, CSV, or NDJSON. The public AWS archive currently goes back to September 16, 2021.

Why NAM still matters

RRFS is still the planned NOAA replacement path for NAM and other legacy regional systems. But the handoff has clearly slipped more than once.

That is an inference from NOAA's own public material:

  • older EMC/NCEP pages from the RRFS development period described RRFS as the replacement track in the 2024 timeframe
  • NOAA's June 26, 2025 service-change notice later proposed the legacy-model shutdown around early 2026
  • NAM is still live in NOAA's AWS Open Data archive as of March 17, 2026

So this onboarding is not a bet against RRFS. It is a practical response to the current state of operations: NAM is still published, still used, and still useful in specific scenarios.

What stands out in this onboarding

The main reason to keep NAM around is not just continuity. It is the variable inventory.

NAM carries a batch of diagnostics that are absent from our other NOAA forecast models today, including:

  • canopy-conductance components such as RCQ, RCS, RCSOL, and RCT
  • diabatic-heating partitions such as CNVHR, LRGHR, SWHR, and LWHR
  • cloud and hydrometeor column diagnostics such as TCLSW, TCOLC, TCOLI, TCOLM, TCOLR, TCOLS, and TCOLW
  • microphysics diagnostics such as RIME

The most distinctive slice is NAM CONUS GOES-Simulated Brightness Temperatures. That feed exposes model-derived GOES brightness temperatures directly, which is useful for model-to-satellite comparison, cloud-top pattern matching, and satellite-analogue workflows without having to post-process the full physics files yourself.

Practical positioning

If you want a concise rule of thumb:

Links

Related models

namawphys namawip12 namconusnest namgoes218
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