EPIC Web Browser: On-line Access to Large Oceanographic and Meteorological In-situ Data Sets

The EPIC Web Browser is a general purpose, interactive, web-based user interface which gives easy on-line access to oceanographic in-situ data sets in EPIC netCDF format through the World Wide Web. The EPIC Web browser provides a user-friendly interface that allows the user to view the data by creating various types of plots and generating listings on-the-fly. The browser is implemented using Java Applets and JavaScript adding flexibility to the data selection process and providing data inventory information.

The EPIC Web Browser consists of a set of perl routines which generates HTML-formatted text dynamically. These routines are designed to be called as CGI-scripts, either with the POST or GET command. Alternatively, the scripts can also be called from inside other perl programs. EPIC system programs and applications are used as back-end analysis and plotting tools. The large oceanographic in-situ data collections are managed using the MySQL database. The current EPIC Web Browser provides more than 1.5 million oceanographic profiles (such as CTD, Bottle, and XBT data from Pacific, FOCI, Puget Sound, VENTS, and NODC World Ocean Database, etc.) and time series (such as surface meteorology data, ocean data , and drifter buoy data from Alaska, Arctic, Puget Sound, etc. and Sea Level data from University Hawaii Sea Level Center). See http://www.epic.noaa.gov/epic/ewb/.