I wanted to share an animated GIF of THREDDS-based Climate Forecast System (CFS) v2 model output.  This particular example was created in late November, and since the CFS model is a climate model, it's forecasts go out to 9 months into the future, with 6-hour resolution!  Obviously, at such time ranges, not much stock should be put into the output, until significant post processing is undertaken to remove "noise."  That said, I like to exercise the ability to use data housed in THREDDS servers, and use the NCEI Weather and Climate Toolkit to create animations of forecast output.

In this case, I show the Precipitable Water (PWAT) valid at 12Z each day for Dec 2016.  I have pre-selected to only show values greater than or equal to 25.4mm (1 inch).  The idea is to see where the model is forecasting moisture-laden features to traverse the country to help identify potential flooding events, snow events, if cold air is present, etc.

Below I describe some my processes for creating such loops...

One of my favorite places to go "look" at data are THREDDS and NOMADS sources like:

http://thredds.ucar.edu/thredds/catalog.html

From there, one can navigate to locations such as:

http://thredds.ucar.edu/thredds/catalog/grib/NCEP/DGEX/CONUS_12km/DGEX_CONUS_12km_20161128_1800.grib2/catalog.html

and:

http://thredds.ucar.edu/thredds/catalog/grib/NCEP/DGEX/CONUS_12km/DGEX_CONUS_12km_20161128_1800.grib2/catalog.html?dataset=grib/NCEP/DGEX/CONUS_12km/DGEX_CONUS_12km_20161128_1800.grib2

The above link allows one to get at the data in a variety of formats (WMS, etc.), as well as use a browser-based viewer called Godiva to peruse contents.

From there, once can insert the links and such into GIS services, ArcGIS Online, etc. depending on how much additional coding one wishes to take.

For what its worth, I then often make Storymaps (see earlier blog post) and visuals (loops) of various meteorological output to assess all kinds of weather and climate topics.