Dynamical.org
Dynamical.org Datasets on Source
Introducing Dynamical.org
dynamical.org is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to advance humanity's ability to access, understand, and act on accurate weather and climate data. The organization uses a governance model that their team calls 'Public Benefit Corporation, Hardcore Mode' — designed to prioritize long-term operations and stewardship. They explicitly: 1) prohibit sale of the organization; 2) require (hypothetical) profit be reinvested in the organization's purpose; and 3) set organizational priorities led by active members and users. Unlike other solutions for weather data management, dynamical.org is building a common utility, making weather data accessible and easy to use as a public good.
Fast, Easy, Open Weather Data for Everyone
The team at dynamical.org knows firsthand how hard it can be to obtain and utilize weather data. As part of their work with Upstream Tech, the founders focused on hydrological predictions — building a model to forecast water flowing through rivers. This required a robust center of weather data to train a model, let alone to operationalize it and deliver a regular forecast. They had many engineers working solely on optimizing weather data infrastructure to accomplish their downstream objectives. They realized many other organizations using weather data were duplicating the same work, reinventing the wheel with scarce resources.
Dynamical is committed to preparing weather data so it is more accessible and easy to use for people with fewer technical skills — making it a public good for everyone. Today, dynamical's weather datasets are accessed by users from all over the world, with 13,000 unique visitors and 31.3 million data requests just in the month of July 2025.
"Source makes the hurdle disappear for folks trying to do something for the public good. The impact for us was being able to get started—focus on the science and experimentation. This kick-started the flywheel in a way that wouldn't otherwise have been possible. It created a virtuous cycle of gaining support because we were able to demonstrate the work. The external impact has been hundreds of organizations saving dozens, if not hundreds of hours dealing with weather data."
— Marshall Moutenot, dynamical.org Founder
Dynamical.org Shares Through Source Cooperative
dynamical.org created a public, live-updating catalog of Zarr-formatted weather datasets that are:
- Easy: Load with one line of code.
- Fast: Read performance optimized for real-time analysis and fast experimentation.
- Open: No lock-in, free access to data.
- Consistent: Standardized structure across all datasets.
Sharing Through Source: Key Benefits and Impact
- Organizational Growth: Enabled dynamical.org to demonstrate impact, helping secure support from NOAA and Amazon, while allowing them to focus on scientific work and data homogenization rather than fundraising for infrastructure.
- Technical Agility: Supported nimbleness and experimentation for petabytes of data storage, enabling rapid iteration and innovation in weather data processing.
- Community Impact: Saved hundreds of organizations significant time (dozens to hundreds of hours) managing weather data, contributing to accelerating weather research and improving humanity's ability to enhance weather forecasts.
Looking Forward
While dynamical currently primarily uses NOAA data, they have plans to integrate data from other government agencies, such as the European center, and private tech weather forecasts.
Find Out More About Dynamical.org
Learn more about dynamical.org: www.dynamical.org
About Source Cooperative
Source Cooperative is the data publishing utility for the web, allowing trusted organizations and individuals to publish data of any kind at any scale.