This page exists to keep track of links for downloading and displaying gridded weather data.
Hopefully, you find this helpful. If you would rather get weather data from the company for which I work instead of worrying about pulling the correct data yourself, send me an email.
An easy to use and powerful gridded data viewer is Panoply, available for download here. Panoply can display grib, grib2, and netCDF files. Panoply runs on Java, so a java environment needs to exist on the host machine. If you are running Linux, you can probably get the latest version of openjdk from your distribution's package manager. For those not running Linux, another source of the Java environment is at AdoptOpenJDK. Or, if your company has a commercial license from Oracle, or you are using Java only for personal use, the official Java might be suitable for you. A couple of things to note about Panoply - winds are displayed as vectors after combining u-wind and v-wind, with speeds displayed as countours. All of the information is there, but it isn't the usual wind barbs. (Sample)
xyGrib is an easy to use tool, available through package managers in Linux, or via download for those running Windows or whose Linux package manager doesn't have xyGrib. It does use wind barbs, but does not cover the full range of upper level charts.
ncBrowse is another tool for displaying data. The data is displayed as a graph instead of on a map
As for data...
A good source of gridded climatological data is here.
GFS forecast data is available here. This will probably be the most complete source. The pgrb2 files seem to be the most helpful to me for my purposes.
ICON forecast data is available here.
Publically accessible ECMWF forecast data is available by going here, then clicking Browse and retrieve WMO Essential data files. The data is rather limited; generally surface, 850hPa, and 500hPa.
More downloadable forecast grid fields (including WAFS) can be found here.