What's up with NAM? [Archive]

Ron Gleason

March 24th 17, 02:14 PM

On Friday, 24 March 2017 08:06:35 UTC-6, Hartley Falbaum wrote:
> Both XC Skies and Dr Jack show NAM as "unavailable". Soundings seem to get it. Anybody know what's going on?

Appears to have not run for 48 hours, multiple folks have contacted NWS

WaltWX[_2_]

March 25th 17, 10:06 PM

The NWS modeling people (NCEP) made some significant changes and updates to the NAM modeling suite effective 03/21 or 03/22. These changes were announced several months ago and a chance was given allowing user web services to test their code. I notified DrJack recently. It looks like changes to the NAM 13KM grid files should have been minimal. But, whenever there are big production suite changes, inevitably it breaks something in the user code. Dr Jack and Chris Ghali of XCSkies will probably figure it out in time.

These changes are called NAM v4... and it will be the last of this system. Development will be frozen from here on out. The 13km NAM remains with the same 13km resolution and forecasts out 84hours but with numerous physics and production changes. The NAM high resolution model now runs at 3km instead of 4km with hourly output to 60 hours.

Don't complain to NWS about this... support your local soaring web services provider.

Walt Rogers WX