Select Sea Surface Variable

Parameter
Your first selection should be to choose a category: Temperature, Height, Wind, or Current. Then select a specific parameter within that category.

Instrument
For each sea surface variable, there are typically several measurement instruments. Descriptions are provided for each instrument. For further information, links are provided to the instrument web site.

Spatial Resolution and Temporal Resolution
The resolution options control the spacing in space and time of the data product.

Time of Day
Some instruments allow you to select the hour of measurement. If this is possible for the selected instrument, you will be given the option of selecting a time of day.

Minimum Quality
Some instruments allow you to select a minimum acceptable quality. Lower quality images may have greater contamination from clouds, rain, or other factors. Using the high quaily settings filters out these values, but produces more missing data.

Algorithm
Some instruments allow you to select a processing algorithm.

Select Geographic Region

To select a geographic region, hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse.  Release the mouse button to complete the rectangle.  To pan the map, click the "Pan" button, then drag the mouse. You also may enter the latitude-longitude range directly in the provided spaces.

Select Time Interval

Enter a time interval either by:
i) Selecting the start and end month-day-years from the pull-down selection boxes. The default date that appears is generally the last date for which data are available.
ii) Dragging the mouse along the time selector. Note that the you will only be able to drag to dates for which data are available.

To pan the timeline, click the Pan button, then drag the mouse. To change the resolution (or zoom level) of the timeline, check the desired resolution level (season, year, or multi-year).

Select Output

Output
Latitude-Longitude map is a 2-D spatial representation of a parameter. If you pick more than one time period, there will be one map per time period. If your selected parameter is a vector quantity, the magnitude is represented by color and the direction is that of the line emanating from the center of each pixel.
Time Series is a 1-D representation of a parameter over time (averaged over the region of your selected box).
Longitude-Time Profile is a 2-D representation of a parameter over time and longitude (averaged over latitudes within your selected box).
Latitude-Time Profile is a 2-D representation of a parameter over time and latitude (averaged over longitudes within your selected box).

Format
You can choose to generate images, data values, or both.
Image options are: GIF, PNG, JPEG, JPEG2000, and HDF-Raster.
GIS options are: GeoTIFF and ArcGIS. For GeoTIFF, choose between float (for ArcGIS) and byte (for browsers).
Scientific data options are: netCDF, HDF SDS, and OPeNDAP.
Raw data options are: ASCII and binary. For binary, select the byte ordering (either PC or Mac/Sun/SGI) of the machine running the software that reads the data (note that on a local network, this may differ from the machine that you log in on!).
Movie options are: MPEG.

Plot Range
The plot range refers the lowest and highest values on the color scale. This option controls how these limiting values are determined.
Pre-set values   Use this selection to keep the color scale consistent across all plots. This is helpful if you are comparing multiple plots of a parameter.
Determined by min and max of data   Use this option to enable the color scale to change with every plot. This will enable the full range of colors to be used in each plot. In this case, i) the minimum plot value is set to minimum data value or 2 standard deviations below the mean (whichever is greater); ii) the maximum plot value is set to maximum data value or 2 standard deviations above the mean (whichever is smaller).
Set the values yourself   Manually set the minimum and maximum values.

Plot Size
This option enables your to change the size of the window containing the plot. The default window size is 640x480. The plot itself will be slightly smaller than these values, to allow room for axis labels and color bar.

Plot Titles
This option enables you to set the titles that appear at the top and bottom of your plots. The bottom title is set by default to the variable name.

Get Data

Transfer Via
The Transfer option lets you choose how the data products will be returned to you. The standard access method is http, which returns the data or images directly to your browser. If your request includes a large number of files, you can choose instead to access the files via ftp. A gzip compress option is available to reduce the size of the download. The gzip option assumes that you have software to decompress the files after you receive them.

Submit Request
When you are satisfied with your selections, press the Access Data button. A new browser window will pop up containing links to your data.