page_title: National Weather Service
section_title: Forecast sub-organizations
hierarchical_section_title: National Weather Service / Forecast sub-organizations
caption_attribution_description: English: Sample image of the National Weather Service's National Digital Forecast Database.
context_page_description: The National Weather Service is an agency of the United States federal government that is tasked with providing weather forecasts, warnings of hazardous weather, and other weather-related products to organizations and the public for the purposes of protection, safety, and general information. It is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration branch of the Department of Commerce, and is headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, within the Washington metropolitan area. The agency was known as the United States Weather Bureau from 1890 until it adopted its current name in 1970.
  The NWS performs its primary task through a collection of national and regional centers, and 122 local Weather Forecast Offices. As the NWS is an agency of the U.S. federal government, most of its products are in the public domain and available free of charge.
context_section_description: The NWS, through a variety of sub-organizations, issues different forecasts to users, including the general public. Although, throughout history, text forecasts have been the means of product dissemination, the NWS has been using more forecast products of a digital, gridded, image or other modern format. Each of the 122 Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) send their graphical forecasts to a national server to be compiled in the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD). The NDFD is a collection of common weather observations used by organizations and the public, including precipitation amount, temperature, and cloud cover among other parameters. In addition to viewing gridded weather data via the internet, users can download and use the individual grids using a "GRIB2 decoder" which can output data as shapefiles, netCDF, GrADS, float files, and comma separated variable files. Specific points in the digital database can be accessed using an XML SOAP service.
caption: Sample maximum temperature map from the NDFD.
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