18 November 2015

A video tour of an RDA data set home page

In this RDA tutorial video, we tour the elements of an individual data set's main information page.

The 6:28 minute video may seem long, but that is much quicker than sending a question via email and waiting for a response. ;-)

13 November 2015

GRIB Practical Exercise 2: Test Spin

NASA's Panoply Data Viewer provides an easy-to-use way to open up and explore many earth science datasets .  It recognizes different flavors of GRIB, HDF and NetCDF and allows you to plot or view data without knowing specifics of a file.  If you haven't already done so, install it now.

12 November 2015

What to do if you experience a "403: Forbidden" access error

Recently a number of RDA users have reported experiencing a "403:  Forbidden" error when attempting to download files with scripts.

If you are experiencing this error, please remove the associated cookie file that you are using to support the script, typically named "auth.rda_ucar_edu", and rerun the script with your RDA username and password to authenticate and download a new cookie.

11 November 2015

What is GRIB2?

I want to expand upon a couple of points that I made in What is GRIB? because we continue to receive questions at rdahelp related to these two ideas.  I  hope, by explaining the why of GRIB, you can better use data in this format.