A Climate Data Portal

The Climate Data Portal links geographically distributed climate data servers in Seattle (Washington), Silver Spring (Maryland), and Honolulu (Hawaii) into a network to provide a portal to distributed data in a common data format to researchers and modeling centers. The data server software connects gracefully to legacy data management at the data provider site and uses off-the-shelf CORBA networking middleware to connect the distributed data servers consistently to the user´s desktop. The use of CORBA services provides network awareness of the distributed data servers, and eliminates the need for a central registry or Web crawlers to locate and interrogate the distributed data servers. The Climate Data Portal is in a prototype testing phase, however, the Java desktop application is available for download at: ftp://www.epic.noaa.gov/java/CDPclient/install.html, and the Web data access page is available at: http://www.epic.noaa.gov/cdp/