HRRR BUFR Sounding Heights

[jtleniger]

Hello,

I'm hoping to pipe the model sounding data from the noaa-hrrr-bdp-pds bucket into SHARPPy. I've been able to pull the data and parse it with pybufrkit, but I'm noticing from the list of descriptors in the BUFR file there is no height data available.

SHARPPy requires height for each data point, in addition to temp, dew, wind, and pressure, so without it I can't create plots.

Is there some way to get this height data? I've inferred from various documentation that the HRRR model runs at 50 vertical levels, but have been unable to find documentation on what these levels are or if they're fixed such that I can just create a lookup table.

Thank you in advance!

[EricJames-NOAA]

@jtleniger very sorry for the extremely late response here. I'm not very familiar with those BUFR files since we've never generated those at NOAA GSL. But I assume there must be some kind of height information in there. In the 3D native level HRRR GRIB2 files, there is a 3D field 'HGT' which is geopotential height. Since the HRRR uses a hybrid sigma - terrain following vertical coordinate, the heights at each point are not fixed in time. But you ought to be able to grab the values from the appropriate time, and then you can convert to pressure or geometric height.

If needed, we can try to reach out to someone at NCEP about the contents of those BUFR files.

Thanks,
Eric