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:
- Switch to the Catalog tab, revealing the search parameters and
results panels.
- Make sure that the chlorophyll-a dataset is selected at the top
of the data access client.
- Select your region of interest at the top of the search
parameters, for example Southern
Florida.
- Change the percent coverage value to about 20.
- Change the number of days to about 10.
- 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.
- The data may now be selected by one of two methods:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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