Jim Lux wrote:
At 02:03 PM 1/31/2007, Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Mitchell Wisidagamage wrote:
Thank you very much for the fire dynamics idea. I will have a look at
it.
I did try to contact many e-science projects including some
researchers at Oxford. But I got no reply. Then I went to get some
contacts from a tutor who worked at a e-science project himself. He
told me people, especially scientists are "very jealous" of their
data. And not replying is a kind way of saying "no". And there's the
problem of "who's this guy wanting my data", "what will he do with it?".
I have given up the e-science idea. Now looking for other real world
applications.
Remember, NASA puts all (or at least a lot) of its e.g. weather data
online.
Well.. not exactly NASA.. operational "weather" data is the province of
NOAA. NASA does research, not operational, data, so there's typically a
time lag, especially for processed and calibrated data.
By and large, most environmental data collected by NASA winds up in
DAACs (Distributed Active Archiving Centers). Physical Oceanography
data, for instance, winds up at PO-DAAC...
http://www-podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/ which has data for sea surface
temperature, sea surface topography, and ocean vector winds acquired by
NASA instruments. This whole process is very well documented, and the
data moves through the various levels of processing and into the
archives in a regular and stately fashion.
But, for instance, the live data from a single instrument (e.g. QuikSCAT
for ocean winds, on which I worked) also gets fed to a realtime process
at NOAA within about an hour after it's received on the ground every 100
minutes, and thence to folks like NCAR who run numerical models, which
then winds up at the NWS and makes the weather predictions more accurate
on the evening news. This is a bit harder to find in a reliable online
source, especially if you want things gridded into standard geographic
grids, etc. It's all out there, but since the funding stream for
distribution is more tenuous (NOAA doesn't have as much money as NASA
for this sort of thing, but they do have "real time" requirements), the
data tends to be a bit more "raw" or idiosyncratic, and not necessarily
in HDF files, etc. It tends to be in whatever format is convenient for
them, which may or may not be convenient for you.
For research purposes, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction
(ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/) makes available all
their model runs on a 6-hourly schedule. These data are available for
~3 days, then expire off the servers here. Historical data subsets are
available via the National Climatic Data Center NOMADS portal
(http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/) which was designed to facilitate access
to the datasets. The National Centers for Atmospheric Research
(http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/) allows access to some limited historic data
in their archives without restriction and facilitates scientific
research with accounts to scientists.
And there are many things one can do with it. Look for the
NOAA sites. You can get sunspot data, proxy temperature data, and much
more, and build your very own climate model. If you do, don't be
surprised if it fails to agree with the current one (due to be
re-released today, IIRC, from the IPCC).
James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875
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Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
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