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/.