Pilot climate data system: A state-of-the-art capability in scientific data management

The Pilot Climate Data System (PCDS) was developed by the Information Management Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to manage a large collection of climate-related data of interest to the research community. The PCDS now provides uniform data catalogs, inventories, access methods, graphical displays and statistical calculations for selected NASA and non-NASA data sets. Data manipulation capabilities were developed to permit researchers to easily combine or compare data. The current capabilities of the PCDS include many tools for the statistical survey of climate data. A climate researcher can examine any data set of interest via flexible utilities to create a variety of two- and three-dimensional displays, including vector plots, scatter diagrams, histograms, contour plots, surface diagrams and pseudo-color images. The graphics and statistics subsystems employ an intermediate data storage format which is data-set independent. Outside of the graphics system there exist other utilities to select, filter, list, compress, and calculate time-averages and variances for any data of interest. The PCDS now fully supports approximately twenty different data sets and is being used on a trial basis by several different in-house research grounds.