AMPS Database (2002-2016)

Background Information

The National Science Foundation sponsored the Antarctic Weather Forecasting Workshop at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center of The Ohio State University in May 2000. As a result of that meeting and trial runs established earlier in the year at OSU which showed the feasibility of real-time mesoscale atmospheric modeling for Antarctica, the Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System (AMPS) was implemented in October 2000. AMPS is a model system run at the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and dedicated to real-time numerical weather prediction in Antarctica. AMPS employs the Polar WRF (earlier Polar MM5), a version of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) optimized for the environment of polar ice sheets by the Polar Meteorology Group of the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University. AMPS is a collaborative effort between NCAR's MMM group and The Ohio State University. The role of NCAR is to run AMPS twice-daily, provide a web interface and model products to the U.S. and international forecasting community, and maintain the model code. The role of The Ohio State University is to continue development of the model physics and to evaluate the system's performance.

The AMPS forecasts are performed twice-daily on either 5 or 6 domains ranging in horizontal resolution from 30-km (45/60/90-km for earlier period) outer domain over about 1/2 of the Southern Hemisphere, to 1 km (3.3 km for earlier period) over McMurdo, the hub of the U.S. Antarctic Program. The forecasts have been archived at NCAR since 2000. This database is intended to make the valuable data from the AMPS archive easily available to the broader Antarctic research and operational communities. The data available here are from the most popular AMPS domains. Gridded data are available at 3 hourly (6 hourly for MM5 output) and monthly mean temporal resolution.

AMPS is supported by The National Science Foundation's Division of Polar Programs.

• Model domains and settings vary at different time periods. Please check Change Log of AMPS Configuration at NCAR.

• Pre WRF (MM5):
  • Data format: ASCII
  • 2002/01 - 2006/06

• WRF:
  • Data format: NetCDF
  • 2006/03 - 2008/10 (20/6.6/6.6/2.2/6.6 km)
  • 2008/11 - 2013/01 (15/5/5/1.67/5 km)
  • 2013/01 - 2013/01 (10/3/3/1/3 km)
  • 2013/02 - 2013/04 (10/3/3/1/3 km)
  • 2013/04 - 2013/05 (10/3/x/1/3 km)
  • 2013/05 - 2016/12 (10/3/x/1/3 km)

• Please click the available time periods and domains in which you are interested from left panel. Your browser will open a new tab for your data.

• To download many files, please use wget or similar utility programs using

  http://polarmet.osu.edu/AMPS/data/nc_fcst/<AMPS version>/<dx>/<varname>/<yyyymm>/

  (for example, wget -e robots=off -r -l1 -nH -nd --no-parent -A "*.nc" http://polarmet.osu.edu/AMPS/data/nc_fcst/v200811/d2/PRES/200811/)

  or

  http://polarmet.osu.edu/AMPS/data/mm5/<timeseriesdx>/<yyyy>/<yyyyymm>/

  (for example, wget -e robots=off -r -l1 -nH -nd --no-parent -A "*.nc" http://polarmet.osu.edu/AMPS/data/mm5/timeseriesd2/2003/200301/)

• Additonal variables are available by request to Polar Meteorology Group, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, The Ohio State University.

Questions, comments, suggestions are most welcome ...

Please email to Dr. David Bromwich or Dr. Sheng-Hung Wang.