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This wiki is a collection of documents and resources describing the NetCDF data format and data flow pathway to enable glider operators to submit real-time and delayed-mode glider data sets to the U.S. IOOS National Glider Data Assembly Center (NGDAC).

The goal of the NGDAC is to provide individual glider operators with a mechanism for making glider data sets available to a variety of end-users via established web services and the Global Telecommunication System. The NGDAC uses a simple NetCDF file specification to represent a single profile gathered by a glider. Groups of these NetCDF files gathered during a deployment, also known as a trajectory, are uploaded to the NGDAC via ftp. Once they arrive at the NGDAC, the files are validated for compliance, aggregated into a single dataset representing the deployment/trajectory and distributed via a public ERDDAP and THREDDS server.

The National Data Buoy Center accesses the individual profiles from the ERDDAP and THREDDS servers, performs some quality checking of the data, encodes the profiles into BUFR format and distributes the BUFR messages to the Global Telecommunication System, making them available for assimilation by regional and global scale ocean forecasting models.

The following pages describe the required file format, NGDAC architecture and process for submitting files to the NGDAC.

• Glider Background and Sampling Terminology
• NetCDF file format description
• NGDAC Architecture
• NGDAC NetCDF File Submission Process

We recommend a thorough reading of the above documentation before beginning the data submission process. Additional questions and information requests should be directed to:

John Kerfoot
Data Analyst/Systems Programmer
Coastal Ocean Observation Lab
Rutgers University
71 Dudley Road
New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
[email protected]
(848) 932-3344