NAM = North American Mesoscale Model. The NAM model is a 13 Kilometer resolution model that is run 4 times daily, every 6 hours at 00z, 06z, 12z and 18z.
The NAM model forecasts are for intervals of 1 hour up to 36 hours and then forecasts at intervals of 3 hours from 36 hours to 84 hours in the future.
The NAM originally started as the ETA model in the late 90s and was enhanced with something called the WRF (open source “weather research forecast”) physics package in 2004-2005. Further development of the NAM was discontinued in 2017 to allocate resources for development of the the newer FV3 geometry-based models.
The NAM is used as initial and boundary conditions for several other models.
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