The Bridge

Consistently the best-verifying global model in the 3–7 day range for most fields. Runs at 00Z and 12Z. The model every forecaster compares others against.

NCEP's global workhorse. Four runs daily (00, 06, 12, 18Z) out to 16 days, freely gridded, backbone of most downstream US forecast products. Looser than ECMWF in the mid-range — but catches some synoptic setups better.

Navy Global Environmental Model. Tuned for marine boundary-layer physics and ocean-atmosphere coupling — the setup that matters most for cargo routing. Four runs a day.

Global Ensemble Forecast System. 31 perturbed runs of GFS, four times a day. Where to look when deterministic guidance starts diverging — probability, spread, and the envelope a single run can't show you.

Coastal Data Information Program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Real-time wave buoy observations along the US Pacific and Atlantic coasts, with WW3-nested forecasts, spectral data, direction, period, and climatology. What Pacific wave routers and deep-water surfers both trust.

Ocean Prediction Center's clickable global basin viewer, driven by the Global Real-Time Ocean Forecast System (Navy HYCOM core). Click any basin — Bering, North Pacific, North Atlantic, Gulf Stream, Kuroshio, US East, US West — for 0 to 72-hour current and SST forecast loops. The visual front door to the model that runs underneath cargo routing.

NOAA's interactive coastal and oceanographic GIS portal. Stack layers however you want — surface currents as direction streaklets, SST, sea ice, NWS marine zones, radar, satellite, observations — all on one panning, zooming map. Different mental model from OPC's basin loops; both are useful for different questions.

Center for Operational Oceanographic Products & Services — NOAA's authoritative tide and tidal-current network. Predictions and live observations at every NOAA station: US coasts, Hawaii, Alaska, Pacific Islands, Great Lakes, plus harmonic constants for shipboard predictors. SF Bay tides live on the dashboard; this is the deeper exploration tool.

CDIP / Scripps experimental wave forecast viewer. Significant wave height, peak period, peak direction, average period — with California regional zoom (San Francisco, Monterey Bay, Central and Southern Coast). Driven by ECMWF as of May 2022. Cleaner and faster than NCEP's product matrix when you actually need to see the next swell train.

The canonical operational sounding database. Twice-daily RAOB observations from every launching station worldwide, archived back to the early 1970s. Temperature, dew point, wind, and full thermodynamic profiles with derived parameters. Where everyone goes when researching a past event.

Current observed soundings from the US radiosonde network, plotted with severe-weather parameters overlaid — CAPE, shear, lifted index, significant tornado parameter. The operational view forecasters use at 00Z and 12Z to read the atmosphere vertically.

Forecast soundings from HRRR, RAP, NAM, GFS, and HiResW at thousands of US points, served by the NWS Seattle office's model-sounding page. Hourly vertical profiles for severe-weather and aviation use. The operational replacement for NOAA's retired RUC sounding tool.

National Blend of Models meteograms — hourly time-series of temperature, dew point, wind, precipitation, and cloud cover for any US point. Pick a location on the NWS forecast map and scroll down for the meteogram. How forecasters read the next 7 days for a single place.

Visualized GEFS ensemble charts — spaghetti plots of 500mb height across all 31 members, ensemble mean, spread maps, probability fields. Where you look when the deterministic GFS starts losing confidence and you need to see what the ensemble envelope says.

ECMWF's ensemble system — 51 perturbed members of the European operational model. Generally tightest probabilistic performance of any global ensemble. Spaghetti plots, cluster analysis, tropical cyclone tracks.

NOAA's current operational hurricane model — Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System. High-resolution, movable inner nests, coupled ocean. Replaced HWRF in 2023 as the primary tropical cyclone forecast model. What NHC uses for track and intensity during active systems.

Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab's multi-model viewer — HAFS operational, HAFS experimental, HWRF legacy comparisons, coupled ocean-atmosphere runs, storm-relative products. Where hurricane researchers see every tropical cyclone model side-by-side.