Data coverage
NOAA's Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA) for the Gulf, East Coast/Atlantic, and Caribbean (GEC) is produced using verified hourly water levels from the National Ocean Service’s Center of Operational Oceanographic Products & Services (CO-OPS). ADvanced CIRCulation Model (ADCIRC) and Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) models are coupled to model coastal water levels and nearshore waves. Hourly water level observations are used for data assimilation and validation to improve the accuracy of modeled water levels and wave datasets. Additional Details: Metadata associated with model domain and time span: - Timeseries - 1979 to 2022 - Size - Approx. 44.6 TB - Domain - Lat 5.8 to 45.8 ; Long -98.0 to -53.8 - Nodes - CORA Metadata Library - Grid cells - CORA Metadata Library - Spatial Resolution: - Centroids: 300-400 meters - Gridded: 500 meters - Projection: 1983 Contiguous USA Albers projection (EPSG:5070) NOTICE: Upcoming AWS S3 Directory Restructuring: Water level and wave datasets resulting from the computation, assimilation, validation, and optimization reanalysis datasets. All products are available in NetCDF (.nc) format: - Effective Date: May - September, 2026 - Changes: CORA datasets are being restructured within NOAA’s S3 Directory Catalogs to support the addition of new domains, derived data, and product application. Before this point, datasets were stored by version to support prototyping. As production and application evolve, this change supports a more stable long-term infrastructure. - CORA Datasets will be rearranged by - Domain: CORA-GEC, CORA-Pac, etc. - Format: Native grid, centroid, and 500m grid, etc. - Origin: Direct model output or a datasets derived from model outputs (E.g. Shoreline datasets, derived daily and monthly maximums, high tide flood predictions, etc.) - Impacts: The CORAV1.1intake.yml file will be updated for new file paths for use with GitHub Repository Notebooks, and/or hard-coded data paths should be updated to reflect new structure. Datasets: Water level and wave datasets resulting from the computation, assimilation, validation, and optimization reanalysis datasets. All products are available in NetCDF (.nc) format: - fort.63.nc - Water level elevation - fort.73.nc - Atmospheric pressure at sea level - fort.74.nc - Wind Velocity - 10 m elevation - maxele.63.nc - Maximum water elevation - swanDIR.63.nc - Spectral mean wave direction - swanTMM10.63.nc - Spectral mean wave period - swanTPS.63.nc - Spectral peak wave period - swanHS.63.nc - Spectral zeroth moment wave height - swanHSmax.63.nc - Maximum spectral zeroth moment wave height Derived Products: Datasets resulting from the computation, modeling, or other processing using existing/collected data. All products are available in NetCDF (.nc) format: - CORA-V1.1-fort.63: Hourly water levels - CORA-V1.1-swanDIR.63: Hourly mean wave direction - CORA-V1.1-swanTPS.63: Hourly peak wave periods - CORA-V1.1-swanHS.63: Hourly significant wave heights - CORA-V1.1-Grid: Hourly water levels interpolated from model nodes to uniform 500-meter resolution grid
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