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Full catalog/NOS STOFS3D
NOS STOFS3D·dataset

Atlantic coast tide and storm-surge water levels, from NOAA's STOFS-3D model

NOAA 3-D Surge and Tide Operational Forecast System for the Atlantic Basin (STOFS-3D-Atlantic)
ocean NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. It tracks how high the water will be along the U.S. Atlantic coast, combining tides with surges from wind and pressure, plus full three-dimensional maps of ocean temperature, saltiness, and currents.

How it's made. NOAA runs a three-dimensional ocean model once a day that blends near-present conditions with up to four days of forecast guidance.

How & where you'd use it. Mariners use it to navigate safely, and emergency managers rely on it to anticipate coastal flooding before storms hit.

What's measured

aws-pdsglobalcoastalmarine navigationdisaster responseweatherwaterenvironmentalmeteorologicaloceanssustainabilityclimate

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

NOTICE - The Coast Survey Development Laboratory (CSDL) in NOAA/National Ocean Service (NOS)/Office of Coast Survey is upgrading the Surge and Tide Operational Forecast System (STOFS, formerly ESTOFS) to Version 2.1. A Service Change Notice (SCN) has been issued and can be found "HERE" NOAA's Surge and Tide Operational Forecast System: Three-Dimensional Component for the Atlantic Basin (STOFS-3D-Atlantic). STOFS-3D-Atlantic runs daily (at 12 UTC) to provide users with 24-hour nowcasts (analyses of near present conditions) and up to 96-hour forecast guidance of water level conditions, and 2- and 3-dimensional fields of water temperature, salinity, and currents. The water level outputs represent the combined tidal and subtidal water surface elevations and are referenced to xGEOID20B STOFS-3D-Atlantic has been developed to serve the marine navigation, weather forecasting, and disaster mitigation user communities. It is developed in a collaborative effort between the NOAA/National Ocean Service (NOS)/Office of Coast Survey, the NOAA/National Weather Service (NWS)/National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Central Operations (NCO), and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. STOFS-3D-Atlantic employs the Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydroscience Integrated System Model (SCHISM) as the hydrodynamic model core. Its unstructured grid consists of 2,926,236 nodes and 5,654,157 triangular or quadrilateral elements. Grid resolution is 1.5-2 km near the shoreline, ~600 m for the floodplain, down to 8 m for watershed rivers (at least 3 nodes across each river cross-section), and

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).