[adamredwoods]

Is there a primer for reading these files?

https://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/gens/

https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/emc/pages/numerical_forecast_s...

[jasonmarks_]

No, not really. If you are just looking to work with the data you want to read about extracting from grib2 format. One of the faster ways off the ground is to use the Pywgrib2_s python package and iterate against the model files using python to extract the fields that are interesting. I have a container on docker hub that has pywgrib compiled with all its dependencies if you want to tinker.

pywgrib https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/lxu/cookbook/a... containerized https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/jmarks213/container...

[counters]

It's far, far simpler for users to simply use eccodes[1], particularly as implemented in xarray[2].

[1]: https://github.com/ecmwf/eccodes [2]: https://docs.xarray.dev/en/stable/index.html