IEM Provided MRMS Archives
Archive Changelog
- 24 Sep 2025: Attempting to consolidate documentation on this page and start to document an upcoming archive data removal of hourly zip files per Iowa State cloud storage changes.
Archive Info
MRMS Project Overview
The MRMS Project is an important part of the IEM's data curation effort. It directly drives the rainfall product within the Daily Erosion Project and is used in a variety of other applications. The IEM has been archiving and generating products from MRMS since the early days running at NSSL prior to being operationalized by the NWS NCEP.
The NSSL MRMS website has a handy Grib Table Listing, which helps with knowing what is available and grib file units.
AWS OpenData Archive
Starting in October 2020, MRMS started to be archived at AWS OpenData, which obsoleted much of the utility of IEM's raw grib product archives. However, this archive does not include what the IEM archived prior to Oct 2020 back to about Sep 2019.
Complete Hourly Zip Archives
Starting September 2019, the IEM started creating hourly zip file archives of all MRMS products distributed over LDM on the mrms.agron.iastate.edu website. This service utilized an unlimited ISU campus storage option called CyBox.
MTArchive Site
To support the Daily Erosion Project and other applications, the IEM archived a select number of MRMS grib fields at per UTC date trees on the MTArchive site , which contains products back to October 2014 (NCEP implementation) and also a "Tile2" binary file (which covered Iowa) from the NSSL days.
The MTArchive site also contains an archive example of the MRMS ReAnalysis, but a more useful copy exists on AWS OpenData.
Real-time Files
The IEM also has a cache of near realtime grib files on metfs1 service, but its utility is not as useful as what you can find at the official MRMS Data Website.