Some of the problems you had with the Environmental Data Connector (EDC) are
not problems with the EDC, but with your ability to install it. To judge it
without having done this strikes me as a bit unfair, as you have been given a
more general task, and presumably once the decision is made the people doing
the install will have permission.
The EDC definitely can see 3-D and 4-D data if the data follow the CF
conventions, and can access 3-D slices. At the moment it can only handle data
in "Geographic" projections (lat-lon) but that will be changing shortly to
support the projections in the CF convention.
I would also add that a satellite oceanography course will be taught next week
by some of my colleagues at OSU in conjunction with some people at COAS. You
might stick you head in during a break and see if you can arrange a time for
someone to show you what the EDC can do before you make a judgment.
I would add that you can use our ERDDAP service to access much of these data
(http://coastwatch.pfel.noaa.gov/erddap/index.html) and get an ASCII file in
ArcGIS grid format, but it too is limited in the projections it can handle.
-Roy
On Mar 16, 2011, at 4:38 PM, Jay Alder wrote:
> Hello all, I am new to using TDS, so I apologize if some of my question are
> obvious. I've been tasked to look into ways of providing regional climate
> model data (all NetCDFs) to GIS users. I had hoped TDS would be able to
> provide this function through WCS, but it doesn't appear to work in ArcGIS (I
> tried version 10 this morning). The WCS service loads and lists the model
> variables, but when I add the layer it more or less says "error". I tried
> Environmental Data Connector (EDC), but without administrative rights I was
> unable to install the ArcMap plugin and had to use the stand alone version. I
> ran into two problems: 1) it didn't list any of the 3D or 4D variables (only
> 2D) and 2) it removed the CF projection information (Lambert_Conformal),
> which unacceptable.
>
> In short, what is the preferred method for providing access to GIS users
> other than having them download the whole file? I'm looking for a solution
> other than just FTP. I also tried enabling NetCDF sub-setting, but my THREDDS
> servlet (version 4.2) gives a 404 error page for dataset.html (even through
> OpenDAP and HTTPServer works). If they can sub-set the file to only download
> certain variables it would make the downloads a lot lighter. I can also write
> a GUI application that would automatically include the projection info and
> related variables.
>
> I'm sorry if these questions are silly or have already been covered, but we
> have on the order of 250 Tb of regional climate data that we're trying to
> make accessible to users (which are primarily GIS folks).
>
> Thanks
>
> --
> Jay Alder
>
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**********************
"The contents of this message do not reflect any position of the U.S.
Government or NOAA."
**********************
Roy Mendelssohn
Supervisory Operations Research Analyst
NOAA/NMFS
Environmental Research Division
Southwest Fisheries Science Center
1352 Lighthouse Avenue
Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097
e-mail: Roy.Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxx (Note new e-mail address)
voice: (831)-648-9029
fax: (831)-648-8440
www: http://www.pfeg.noaa.gov/
"Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."
"From those who have been given much, much will be expected"
