The NEXRAD Amazon Web Services (AWS) Archive is a collection of NEXRAD Level II data files that are stored in the Amazon S3 cloud storage service. The archive is available to the public and can be accessed using a variety of data retrieval tools including the AWS Command Line Interface and NSF Unidata's Siphon package.
Since the launch of the archive in 2015, NSF Unidata has been working with the NOAA Open Data Dissemination program (NODD) to populate the archive as new NEXRAD Level II data become available. Beginning in late July 2025, we will be changing the AWS S3 bucket that contains up-to-date NEXRAD Level II archive data, affecting how users access the data via AWS. These changes are being made at the request of the AWS Open Datasets team in order to simplify account management for the bucket.
The NEXRAD Level II AWS archive is now available under the name
unidata-nexrad-level2, with the url
https://unidata-nexrad-level2.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html.
Users of the bucket only need to update the bucket name in code and API requests from
noaa-nexrad-level2 to unidata-nexrad-level2. The pattern
used to create object filenames and the format of the data within the bucket remain unchanged.
Users of the SNS notification topic for new data arriving in the bucket need to
update the account number for the topic (from 811054952067 to
684042711724), leaving the topic name unchanged.
As a result, the AWS Resource Name (ARN) for the SNS topic changes to
arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:684042711724:NewNEXRADLevel2Archive.
See NEXRAD on AWS for additional details.
Other NSF Unidata-managed NEXRAD AWS buckets (unidata-nexrad-level2-chunks
and unidata-nexrad-level3) and their associated SNS topics are unaffected.
We plan to discontinue updates to the legacy bucket noaa-nexrad-level2
on September 1, 2025. If you have questions about switching your access to
the new bucket, please contact support-level2@unidata.ucar.edu for assistance.
