Greyhound is our entry-level free weather data service offering for Boxer & Terrier. You get access to all of our free data right out of the box. It’s helpful for putting radar on your web map, for instance, but there’s a lot more data available. There’s a complete listing of what’s in Greyhound, but let’s talk about some of the more commonly used parts.
Radar in Our Free Weather Data Service: MRMS
Our most popular part of this free weather data service is probably the Multi-Resolution Multi-System Mosaic (MRMS) radar mosaic provided by NOAA. We process these frames of data as they come in and make them available for display in Greyhound. If you have high-end access, you can query, too—but that’s a discussion for another day.
At this point, we’re processing most of the MRMS layers, and Greyhound gives you access to all of them. For reflectivity, you’ve got MBR as above, as well as a composite with MCR. The latter provides a top-down view of what’s happening rather than relying solely on the lowest scan.
Did you know that MRMS has several hail layers as well? We caught one on a good day. Or a bad day, from the perspective of a car windshield. Or a solar farm or a roof… hail is just bad news.
Radar is fun, but we also process a lot of weather model data. Let’s look at a couple of the most useful in the US.
GFS: A Global Workhorse
As part of our comprehensive free weather data service, we process Global Forecast System (GFS) data, which is best described by NOAA. It runs 4 times a day, and we process a lot of it.
The temperature at 2m, seen above, is what most users are looking for. It’s always interesting to see how much hotter it can be at the surface.
Wind at 10m is also popular, and we’re always adding new levels to this one. Cloud cover and visibility are also important, as is a composite reflectivity calculation that you can pair with a radar display.
Beyond that, we have the usual variables, such as humidity, pressure, dew point, and many others, which are generally used for calculation rather than display.
HRRR: High-Resolution Forecasts
The High Resolution Rapid Refresh model (HRRR) is available over the continental US and Alaska as part of our free weather data service. There’s a newer one in the works, the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS), but it seems to be on hold at the moment. We’ll make it available when they switch over.
For now, the CONUS and Alaska coverage looks like this.
HRRR runs every hour for an 18-hour forecast and every 6 hours for a 48-hour forecast. There is also 15-minute data available, and we combine all these together for display.
Most of the same variables are available for HRRR as for GFS, but here’s a fun one: Downward SW radiation flux—the amount of energy that reaches the surface, basically.
There are many more that are, you guessed it, more commonly used for computation.
NDFD: Local Forecasts, Nationwide Reach
We discussed the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) more extensively last week, which features a wealth of valuable data sets that are visually appealing. Temperature, wind, dew point, all that good stuff.
It’s mostly data over CONUS, as you’d expect, but I thought the Alaska domain has a certain “cut out from a magazine” vibe to it.
NDFD is one of the many sources we include in our free weather data service to support high-quality visual forecasts.
There are a whole host of others that (say it with me now!) are mostly good for computation.
What Else Is in Our Free Weather Data Service?
Those are the most popular radar and weather models our customers use with our free weather data service. We have a few others you can peruse in the full list available in Greyhound, but these are the favorites.
I wish we could take you on a tour of the proprietary data we process…. but we can’t. Because it’s proprietary.
We’re always expanding what’s available in our free weather data service. If there’s a specific dataset you’d like to see added to Greyhound, let us know!