Enhanced Visualization Tool Available at the ARM Climate Research Facility (ACRF) Data Archive

Summary

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program’s Climate Research Facility Data Archive rolled out an enhanced software tool (NCVweb) that allows users to extract a subset of fields from a data stream to create custom files. The new data extraction capability also performs a number of visualization functions that would be time-consuming or difficult for users to do themselves, especially users new to ARM-formatted files. NCVweb has many powerful features such as producing detailed tables of the data file contents, data extraction, generating statistics, and plotting one variable against another. The enhanced tool helps to eliminate the need for and problems associated with downloading large volumes of data, installing and configuring visualization software, or writing custom data exploration software. Although NCVweb is currently limited to extractions from within a single data stream, plans are in place to expand the capability to merge data from several data streams into a single output product.