The Environmental Research Division’s Data Access Program (ERDDAP) is a data server that gives you a simple, consistent way to download subsets of gridded and tabular scientific datasets in common file formats and make graphs and maps. This particular ERDDAP installation has oceanographic data (for example, data from satellites and buoys). ERDDAP unifies the different types of data servers so you have a consistent way to get the data you want, in the format you want: (A) ERDDAP acts as a middleman between you and various remote data servers. When you request data from ERDDAP, ERDDAP reformats the request into the format required by the remote server, sends the request to the remote server, gets the data, reformats the data into the format that you requested, and sends the data to you. You no longer have to go to different data servers to get data from different datasets; (B) ERDDAP offers an easy-to-use, consistent way to request data: via the OPeNDAP standard. Many datasets can also be accessed via ERDDAP’s Web Map Service (WMS); (C) ERDDAP returns 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. So you no longer have to waste time and effort reformatting data; (D) ERDDAP can also return a .png or .pdf image with a customized graph or map; (E) ERDDAP standardizes the dates+times in the results. Data from other data servers is hard to compare because the dates+times often are expressed in different formats (for example, “Jan 2, 2018”, 02-JAN-2018, 1/2/18, 2/1/18, 2018-01-02, “days since Jan 1, 1900”).
