forcingkit

_{HRRR 10 m wind served by forcingkit through the 26-27 September 2026 nor'easter, NY Bight to Cape Cod, from the calm of 22 September to the calm of 29 September, every 3 hours (peak 25.9 m/s). The forcingkit viewer's time slider, played.}

Spatiotemporal forcing for computational Earth-system models: selects, regrids and serves model-ready time series with provenance.

forcingkit sits between operational and archive data providers (NOAA HRRR, NECOFS, NOAA OFS, HYCOM, NDBC, CO-OPS) and model codes such as Oceananigans.jl. It delivers a model's parent ocean on true z levels (/api/v1/obc) and its HRRR surface atmosphere on a regular grid (/api/v1/atmosphere), plus station observations for validation, as schema-versioned Zarr stores that record their sources.

forcingkit was named ecodata-cache until 2026-10-05; GitHub redirects the old repository URLs. The Python package is forcingkit (was ecodata_cache), and environment variables use the FORCINGKIT_ prefix; the old names are still read, with a warning, until the next release. Documentation: https://forcingkit.docs.lhzn.io, including the routes removed on the same date.

Goals

The primary goal of forcingkit is to provide clean, standardized ocean and atmospheric forcing boundaries for high-fidelity coastal hydrodynamic models. We achieve this by:

• Operating as an invisible, self-managing proxy service that orchestrates downloading and caching of remote data.
• Stripping away the quirks of individual forecasting nodes by harmonizing temporal alignment, grid structures, and variable naming conventions.
• Generating deterministic cache hashes to ensure simulation runs are 100% physically reproducible over time.

Features

• Decoupled System Architecture: The microservice guarantees reproducible datasets by deterministic hashing, providing standardized local representations of external APIs.
• Continuous Coupled Hindcasts: Support for 45-to-60-day continuous hindcasts by dynamically stitching historical and operational HYCOM experiments.
• Temporal Alignment: Automated CF-compliant hourly interpolation across heterogeneous upstream timestamps and grid frequencies.

Current Coverage

• Oceanic Forcing: NYOFS, NECOFS, DBOFS, HYCOM (Operational & Historical).
• Atmospheric Forcing: HRRR (3 km, hourly, 2014-07-30 to present), regridded to 0.03 degrees.

Roadmap

• Enhanced IOOS Coverage: Expanding our data fetchers to support more regional nodes across the West Coast (WCOFS) and Gulf of Mexico (NGOFS2).
• Improved Caching Policies: Implementing dynamic cache invalidation based on NOAA operational forecast updates to ensure realtime predictions stay synchronized.
• Variable Expansions: Providing native spatiotemporal transformations for wave spectra and biogeochemical tracers.

Architecture overview

The service exposes HTTP APIs (via FastAPI/Uvicorn) which:

1. Deterministically hash bounding boxes and time windows to generate an automated local Zarr cache (~/.cache/forcingkit).
2. Dispatch fetch operations via tiered fallback chains for high-availability. (e.g. DBOFS or NYOFS -> NECOFS -> HYCOM for the parent ocean).
3. Standardize dimensions, bounds, floating-point precision, and timezone offsets, providing a direct ingestion path for downstream coupled engines.

Setup

uv sync
pre-commit install

# Development (single worker, run from the repository root):
uv run uvicorn service.forcingkit_serve.main:app --port 9598

# Service launcher (supports --host/--port/--workers/--reload):
uv run python service/run_server.py --host 0.0.0.0 --port 9598 --workers 4

Docker Environment

The Dockerfile defaults to ubuntu:24.04, which is multi-arch. This service is CPU-only, so the default works unchanged on x86_64 and on arm64 edge hardware; BASE_IMAGE exists for cases that need a different base.

# x86_64 and arm64 alike (default)
docker build -t forcingkit .

docker run --rm -p 9598:9598 forcingkit

On NVIDIA Jetson under JetPack 7 (L4T R39, Ubuntu 24.04), keep the default base. An earlier revision of this file recommended --build-arg BASE_IMAGE=nvcr.io/nvidia/l4t-base:r36.2.0; that was wrong on two counts. The l4t-* image family was never published beyond r36.4.0 (JetPack 6.1), so there is no R39 equivalent to move to, and this service needs no CUDA in the image regardless. Where a CUDA base genuinely is required, the JetPack 7 path is the unified nvcr.io/nvidia/cuda:<ver>-*-ubuntu24.04 images, which carry real arm64 manifests, combined with CDI device injection (--device nvidia.com/gpu=all). Note that --gpus all is rejected on Tegra.

Licensing

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.