The IEM attempts a robust processing and archival of National Weather Service issued text products. This page details the many ways that you can access this data. Unless denoted otherwise, all of these resources update in realtime.
A common nomenclature used by the IEM is to assign an identifier, that
unfortunately is not always unique because of lame NWS bugs, to each product.
These look like so YYYYmmddHHMM-CCCC-TTAAII-AFOSID(-BBB:optional).
The timestamp is UTC, the CCCC is the issuance center, TTAAII is the WMO
header, the AFOSID is a 3 to 6 character identifier, sometimes called AWIPS ID,
and the final -BBB field is only used when that is included in the product.
This value is often available within various NWS data APIs within the IEM.
Pro-tip. You can enter this identifier into the IEM website search box to find the product quickly. The nwstext API is the main place to use this identifier.
- See this news item for more details on this archive and how it is made available.
- AFOS Product Finder
If you know what you are looking for, this app works great! - List Products by WFO by Date
View quick listings of issued products by forecast office and by date.
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Common Alert Protocol (CAP) Hourly Files
This mtarchive resource contains hourly files of CAP messages. - Simple directory listing
Certain warning type products can be found in the main IEM data archive directory structure in per UTC date directories. - NWS Record Event Reports
Daily reports of record temperatures and precipitation for mostly Iowa since November 2001.manually populated
Many folks use the IEM as a near realtime data source. This section details some of the techniques used.
The primary service used is the
AFOS retrieve service. It supports
date range queries by AWIPS IDs (ie TORDMX, AFDDMX).
There is also a
metadata list service which helps to find available products for a given
date and issuance center.
Another technique involves using the scrapable archives shown on this page, with subsequent HTTP requests using HTTP-range headers to download the data efficiently.
- Map of Text Product Issuance Counts
Autoplot 210 will generate maps of how many text products are issued for a given product type. It will also plot the first and last usage of a product.
Publications Citing IEM Data (View All)
These are the most recent 10 publications that have cited the usage of data from this page. This list is not exhaustive, so please let us know if you have a publication that should be added.
- Cannon, F., S. Pfrendschuh, et al. 2024, Deep Learning for Multi-Satellite Precipitation Retrievals: Impact of Tomorrow.io’s Microwave Sounders, Tomorrow.io Technical Paper. https://d197for5662m48.cloudfront.net/documents/publicationstatus/237369/preprint_pdf/90048249e91118233f5dd7edfc3dd6fe.pdf