Introduction to ERDDAP¶
The goal of ERDDAP is to simplify the access and use of scientific data. ERDDAP acts as a central repository for gridded and tabular data from multiple sources, both local and remote. This allows a user to have access to data in one place, while having the added capabilities of subsetting, graphing, mapping and downloading the data in a variety of commonly used formats.
Image from from CoastWatch-WestCoast
Some features of ERDDAP include (from CoastWatch-WestCoast):
- Data in the common file format of your choice. ERDDAP offers all data as .html table, ESRI .asc and .csv, Google Earth .kml, OPeNDAP binary, .mat, .nc, ODV .txt, .csv, .tsv, .json, and .xhtml
- ERDDAP can also return a .png or .pdf image with a customized graph or map
- Standardized dates/times ("seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z" in UTC)
- A graphical interface for humans with browsers
- RESTful web services for machine-to-machine data exchange and downloading data directly into your software applications (e.g.Matlab, R, Python...) and even into web pages.
Useful links for learning more about ERDDAP¶
An introductory video to ERDDAP