About this product
GEOS-5 FP — Forward Processing — is NASA's global model, run by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at Goddard. It is not another weather-service model: GEOS carries a full aerosol module alongside the meteorology, which is why this page can draw a dust forecast that no other model on this site runs at all.
The seven fields here are the ones GMAO draws on its own public weather maps, from the same files — 2-metre temperature, three-hour precipitation, sea-level pressure, dust aerosol optical thickness, 500 hPa heights, 850 hPa temperature and the 250 hPa jet — with this site's timeline, pointer readout, compare tool and exports over them.
Three-hourly, to ten days on the 00Z run and five on 12Z. That is the cadence every one of the seven fields can produce. Some of them are published hourly and are not drawn that way here: the hourly files are one-hour means, which is not what a 250 hPa wind should be, and dust and precipitation have no hourly product at all — so an hourly page would put two fields on a different clock from the other five.
Sea-level pressure is drawn everywhere, unlike the GFS page here, which publishes it over the ocean only. That is not a difference in care: the GFS surface-flux files carry no sea-level pressure at all, so that chart is built from surface pressure and is honest only over water. GEOS publishes a proper reduction of its own, so this one is defined over land as well — and the two will disagree over high ground by design.
The colours are GMAO's. The dust, 850 hPa and jet tables are NASA's own colour bars, imported from the GEOS-ESM/WxMap themes into this site's colour-table library — including the opacity fade that makes clean air transparent and the position warp that keeps thin dust from washing the map beige. The surface fields take this site's tables instead, so they read against the GFS and RRFS charts at value; GMAO's own are one click away in the colour picker.
Data from NASA/GMAO via the NCCS datashare portal. U.S. government work, in the public domain. Forecast Eagle is not affiliated with NASA or GMAO.