FY 1998

Sharing oceanographic and atmospheric model outputs over the World Wide Web: A portable server for gridded climate data

Hankin, S., J. Callahan, J. Davison, and D.E. Harrison

In CALMet 97, 3rd International Conference on Computer-Aided Learning and Distance Learning in Meteorology, 1997 Joint Assemblies of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS) and International Association for Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO), Melbourne, Australia, 1–9 July 1997, on CD (1997)

The Web is transforming access to observational data for scientific research but it has had relatively little impact on modelers and their data sets. The enormous size of model outputs makes it awkward for modelers to share their raw results. A lack of standardization in binary data encodings exacerbates the situation. The Live Access Server, developed at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL), allows a scientist to break through some of these data sharing barriers. Supporting a range of interfaces, from Java to simple HTML, the PMEL server provides a point and click front end to the scientific analysis and visualization program Ferret. The Web user can browse, visualize, subset, and reformat a range of gridded data sets on-the-fly. The server has been packaged for portability, ease of installation, and a high level of configurability. Families of servers, providing related data sets, can for a virtual data base providing a single interface that seamlessly merges distributed data sets.