Rob Hetland’s web journal

This may not be new news, but it was a good find. Here is a very extensive archive of publicly available model output. This could be used, for example, for regional model boundary conditions:

http://apdrc.soest.hawaii.edu/dods/public_data/

An example python script for making a movie of ssh in the Indian ocean from the Navy Layer Ocean Model is found after the fold (more…)

Rich Signell sent me this advice on getting DODS/OpenDAP working for my model output:

The 5 step program to a blissful OpenDAP Life

• Inspiration: grab the mexcdf_dap binary for your platform and “get_roms_dap.m” at: http://cove.whoi.edu/~rsignell/mexcdf_dap Make sure that “which mexcdf53″ points to your new OpenDAP-enabled mexcdf53 mex file, and then run the “get_roms_dap” demo script.
• Kick Ass: Get the IDV http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/idv/. Replace the “idv.jar” file in your IDV installation directory with this updated “idv.jar”: ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/idv/untested/idv.jar Then get http://cove.whoi.edu/~rsignell/john/DefaultIdv_rps.tar.gz and unpack it from your “~/.metapps” directory so that it overwrites the files in the ~/.metapps/DefaultIdv directory. Start IDV, and in the Displays menu, select: Displays=>Favorite Bundles=>Adriatic=Test01
• Good Citizen: Serve your netcdf data via OpenDAP: Grab the “CGI Server Base” and “CGI Server NetCDF module” for your web server from http://opendap.org/download/index.html and then follow the install instructions at: http://opendap.org/server/install-html/install.html Basically all you do is unpack the binaries into your cgi-bin directory, edit a conf file to point to the places where you have netcdf files, and who can have access. It took me 35 minutes to get our OpenDAP server going!
• Ultimate Citizen: Make a THREDDS catalog http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/projects/THREDDS of your DODS-served data so folks can view it with tools like the IDV. These are simple XML files that just tell tools like IDV the protocol and location of the data. Check out an example at: http://cove.whoi.edu/~rsignell/adria-models.xml
• Go Uptown: If you want to get a bit fancier, install an aggregation server. http://www.opendap.org/server/agg-html/, which just makes it possible for groups of files to appear as one.