Adding additional snow variables to HRRR reformatter

[norlandrhagen]

Hi there,

This project is super exciting! Really cool to see more ARCO Zarr and Icechunk stores publicly shared.

Wondering if you are open to a PR to add a few more variables to the HRRR forecast reformatter?

Thanks!

[aldenks]

@norlandrhagen totally! what variables / levels are you interested in? We might not add all initially, depends on how commonly used we expect them to be.

[norlandrhagen]

@aldenks great! I was thinking of a few snow related variables for the surface level forecast.

|    long_name                               |   short_name   |
|--------------------------------------------|----------------|
| Total Snowfall                             | ASNOW_acc_fcst | 
| Snow Depth                                 | SNOD           |
| Snow Cover                                 | SNOWC          |
| Water Equivalent of Accumulated Snow Depth | WEASD          |
 

Happy to attempt a PR for a single variable if that's helpful to start.

[aldenks]

@norlandrhagen definitely for total snowfall and probably for the last three.

Is the forecast as opposed to current/past best estimate (analysis) or hourly (not daily) time step of depth, cover, and SWE important to you? I ask because I imagine (but haven't verified) that the quality of HRRR's land surface snow states aren't as good as those in a dedicated snow analysis product. The code in this repo has been used to create a zarr of the U Arizona snow dataset that's a daily step analysis dataset that assimilates snow station observations (https://github.com/dynamical-org/reformatters/tree/main/src/reformatters/contrib/uarizona/swann/analysis). We haven't released that under dynamical.org because we've been focusing on gridded atmospheric data.

[aldenks]

This was a good prompt for me to create documentation on how to do this. Step 1 is something I'd welcome from you if you're interested (and i can hit go on the subsequent steps). https://github.com/dynamical-org/reformatters/blob/main/docs/add_new_variable.md