EDAC Help: A step-by-step example

Suppose that your goal as a data user is to find the most recent chlorophyll-a data for southern Florida. The most obvious way to find the data would be to select the chlorophyll-a dataset, select the latest date and time, and zoom in on southern Florida. But in many cases due to cloud cover, data may not be available in the latest file and the data view will show nothing. Use the following steps as a guide to find and view the data:

  1. Switch to the Catalog tab, revealing the search parameters and results panels.
  2. Make sure that the chlorophyll-a dataset is selected at the top of the data access client.
  3. Select your region of interest at the top of the search parameters, for example Southern Florida.
  4. Change the percent coverage value to about 20.
  5. Change the number of days to about 10.
  6. Click the Search button and the results panel should show a number of thumbnail previews. If not, relax the search parameters by decreasing the coverage value or increasing the number of days and click Search again.
  7. The data may now be selected by one of two methods:
    1. Directly from the Icon View: Select a thumbnail preview that has enough data for your area of interest. Double-click the thumbnail to show the data in the View tab.
    2. From the List View: Switch the results panel to the List View tab and click the header of the Coverage column to sort the table in ascending order by coverage of the selected region. Double-click the last table entry (ie: with the highest coverage value) to show the data in the View tab.
  8. In the View tab, zoom in on your region of interest, either by using the Zoom to Selected button and manually clicking and dragging a rectangle, or using the Show Region button and selecting the geographic location name, for example Southern Florida.
  9. Your data of interest is now displayed. Pass the mouse pointer over the data view to show the chlorophyll-a data value and geographic coordinates. Use the toolbar to change the overlays, view area, palette, and color scale range. CoastWatch HDF data can be downloaded to work with locally using the CoastWatch Data Analysis Tool (CDAT), or accessed via OPeNDAP (see Accessing data files for more details on CDAT and OPeNDAP).

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