Documents and datasets from Data Support

The Data Support Section (DSS) website at http://www.scd.ucar.edu/dss/ is a valuable resource for researchers in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. It provides a window to NCAR's large, organized archive of computer-accessible research data that is made available to scientists around the world. The archive represents an irreplaceable store of observed data and analyses and is used for major national and international atmospheric and oceanic research projects. There are now over 480 distinct datasets in the archive, ranging in size from less than 1 MB to over 1 TB.

Here are some noteworthy additions available through the DSS website.

Atmospheric and oceanographic datasets document published

NCAR staff from the Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) and SCD have published a complete hypertext version of "An Introduction to Atmospheric and Oceanographic Datasets." This NCAR Technical Note in the Instructional Aid series is an overview of data types, formats, and sources used by researchers in meteorology and oceanography. It is available as a hypertext document or as a compressed PostScript file.

All TOGA COARE datasets archived at NCAR

NCAR's Data Support Section is an archive site for data products in support of the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE). The Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere program (TOGA) is a major component of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) aimed specifically at the prediction of climate phenomena on time scales of months to years. The Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE) seeks to describe and understand the principal processes responsible for the coupling of the ocean and the atmosphere in the western Pacific warm pool system.

All COARE datasets are archived at NCAR by the Data Support Section. They are stored on the MSS and available to all NCAR users; they are not available for downloading via the DSS website.

Most of the datasets are available from other sites. Non-NCAR researchers who need only small datasets, or small subsets of these sets, should consult the TOGA COARE Data Information Unit to see if the data they require are available for free by ftp. Datasets that are not easily available from another source may be ordered from Ilana Stern at DSS. (None of the TOGA COARE datasets are directly available from the DSS ftp machine.) Scientists with access to NCAR's MSS are welcome to make use of the local archive.

The idea is that users who need only single datasets or small amounts of data can get it directly from the sites which have those sets online or are maintaining that data, but those who need large datasets or many datasets can place an order with DSS. Also NCAR scientists can get the data directly from the MSS.

Stay informed about dataset changes

To stay in touch with changes to the DSS website, you can watch the "What's New" list provided at the bottom of the DSS home page. To keep tabs on recent additions to the dataset collection, you can visit the New datasets page. You may also want to check the Recently updated datasets list.

Finally, remember that the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis project continues to release new data, and that updates are always available via http://www.scd.ucar.edu/dss/pub/reanalysis/