Welcome to CGD

 

CGD Data and Data Sets

In response to community requests for easier access to climate model data, data products from the CCSM are available on-line (http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/experiments/), including the the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) NCAR initiative and through the SCD's Community Data Portal. These products, which are considerably more refined than the raw history data output directly from the CCSM, have proven to be very popular with climate change researchers, both in the United States and internationally.

In addition, an ongoing thrust within CGD has been the acquisition, evaluation, improvement, and restructuring of datasets, development of climatologies and high-level derived products, and facilitation of access to data and documentation in CAS catalogs available online. New SST datasets and many new derived products from atmospheric reanalyses are especially prominent.

Observational datasets are available on a variety of grids and data formats: GRIB, netCDF, HDF4, HDF-EOS4 and binary. These datasets form the foundation for scientific studies and evaluating climate models. Data from satellites (e.g., Earth Observing System) need to be exploited in order to achieve our scientific objectives. These satellite datasets and the derived products will be available only in the HDF5 and HDF-EOS5 formats. The HDF5 formats are not extensions to HDF4. They can represent elaborate data structures and, as a result, are very complicated to use. CGD, in collaboration with SCD, will develop interfaces that facilitate use of the new satellite data.

The observational and CCSM data sets are also available through SCD's Community Data Portal. The CDP is a collection of earth science datasets from NCAR, UCAR, UOP, and participating organizations.