NOAA's Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory distributes the Live Access Server (LAS), a popular Web-based system for providing access to geo-referenced scientific data. At the Climate Diagnostics Center we are continuing to experiment with this system for providing Web-based access to our collection of climate data.

As climate data providers we must provide robust and flexible mechanisms for users to search, create plots and subsets and download data from our Web site. The Live Access Sever user interface goes a long way toward meeting those goals. However, in order to provide interfaces that more closely match the character of the data being examined we have experimented with creating custom interfaces to be used by LAS.

For example, many of our data sets include many different time intervals, average periods and secondary statistics for the same physical parameter. An expanding hierarchical menu is an effective way to organize and present these complex choices to the user. This paper provides details of integrating this type of interface with the current LAS software system.

Other data sets that we distribute are extremely uniform, with exactly the same time intervals and statistics for many different physical parameters. An interface that exposes these similarities to the user is a good design choice for these data sets. Repeated information is not hidden behind expanding menus. Users can make choices without opening secondary menus. This paper also provides details of integrating this type of interface with the current LAS software system.