The Climate Data Portal system links geographically distributed in-situ data servers into a network to provide a portal to distributed data in a common data format to researchers and modeling centers. Currently, the Climate Data Portal system consists of distributed Data Servers at PMEL (real-time TAO buoy date and PMEL archived in-situ data collection), University of Hawaii (sea level data from Sea Level Center), and NODC (the Global Temperature-Salinity Profile Program (GTSPP) dataset). Data is available through a Java desktop application or a Web page.

This paper describes the Data Server software, and client interfaces include Java application and web access. The Climate Data Portal system is fully object oriented, utilizing off-the-shelf CORBA networking middleware. The data servers support both Java desktop application and web access. While the Java desktop application supports users with a high-bandwidth network connection and provides user with a high degree of interactivity, the Web interface support users with easy access using a web browser. The client interfaces support a customized search of data collections (including keywords, geographic range and time range), plotting/co-plotting of data from geographically distributed sites, display data collection and individual data file properties, listing of data in a common data format and download data file in netCDF format. The Climate Data Portal desktop application, written in java, uses the Java Swing GUI components and Java libraries to directly connect to the data (CORBA) and directory (LDAP) servers. The Climate Data Portal Web interface includes data selection functions implemented in JavaScript and Java Applets, and provides a dynamic content web presentation using Java Servlet and Java Server Page technologies. The Java desktop application can be downloaded freely at ftp://www.epic.noaa.gov/java/CDPclient/install.html. The Climate Data Portal Web interactive interface can be accessed from the web at http://www.epic.noaa.gov/cdp/.