A Climate Data Portal

Many ocean observing systems have been deployed to satisfy the needs of research scientists and to fulfill the mission requirements of various government agencies. NOAA data and data of interest to the research community is presently held by a variety of organizations and agencies throughout the world. Increasingly, project offices for various observing system elements are providing quality controlled data to the research community, often in realtime. El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) observing system data from the TAO buoy network in the tropical Pacific, which has been provided in realtime on the internet and the Web since the inception of the project, is only one of many examples of this concept today. These advances in Web and internet technology, coupled with the increasing volume of data going on-line by individual project offices, point logically towards the development of a portal through which uniform access is provided to widely distributed observing system data holdings.

The Climate Data Portal links geographically distributed climate data servers into a network to provide a portal to distributed data in a common data format to researchers and modeling centers. Applications for the Climate Data Portal include interactive, desktop Java graphics, and data delivery from various NOAA ENSO observing systems and NOAA NODC historical data archives to modeling centers and to the scientist's desktop in a common, consistent data stream. Data from distributed data servers can be plotted together on the users desktop with a Java desktop application or through web pages.