Documentation for the PCIC Data Portal¶
User Documentation¶
The main goal of the PCIC Data Portal boils down to one simple idea: give users data. The Data Portal attempts to provide a flexible system to give you the climate data that you need and only the climate data that you need. Spatiotemporal climate data can be extremely bulky and expensive to store, so we have created a system that doesn’t waste resources by giving users more information than that in which they are interested. Selecting only one’s data of interest is a foundational idea of the system.
- Meteorological Data Portal
- Climate Coverage Portals
- Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I get help using the data portal?
- Where can I report a bug or request a feature?
- Why is it so slow to download my file?
- What is a NetCDF file and how do I use it?
- How do I interpret this climate data? (a.k.a, What is CF Metadata?)
- Why can’t I download climate model output in Excel?
- Can I download climate model output in a “GIS-friendly” format?
- How do I interpret the date fields in the data responses
- When I try to download PRISM data, I’m told that the map “Cannot resolve selection to data grid”. Why?
- Why is the “CSV” format nothing like what I expect? Why can’t I import it into Excel?
- Why do some datasets have slightly negative precipitation values?
- Why are there blank cells in downloaded routed streamflow data?
Contributor’s Guide¶
While the Data Portal is a climate service offered by PCIC, the software that runs it is all Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). As such anyone is welcome to contribute to the project under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This doesn’t necessarily mean coding though; there are lots of ways to contribute. We do welcome code and GitHub pull requests, but you can also help by reporting or helping to identify a bug, helping users in need of assistance, improving the documentation to answer real user’s questions, or simply telling your story about how the data portal has helped your study. See the full Contributor’s Guide for more details.
Developer Documentation¶
The developer documentation is intended for the few software developers who are contributing code to the PCIC Data Portal. Much of it is auto-generated from the module and function docstrings. It is intended to be a low-maintenance reference, but use at your own risk.