General Documentation

This page contains links to various general documentation that is applicable to many of our datasets, or that, while not applicable to our specific datasets, may be useful to any user of meteorological and oceanographic data.

• An Introduction to Atmospheric and Oceanographic Datasets
This NCAR Technical Note in the Instructional Aid series is an overview of data types, formats, and sources used by researchers in meteorology and oceanography. It is available in several different formats.

• Data Usage Hints
These documents are intended to aid users of our archive in getting access programs to run on their systems, and in dealing with some common data access and format problems.

• Documents Scanned by by DSS
We have numerous documents of general interest to users of our archive that previously were only available in hardcopy form.

• ECMWF Data Users' Newsletter
A mailing list exists to distribute bulletins from NCAR/DSS and ECMWF about ECMWF datasets at NCAR, such as announcements of data updates, problems which have been discovered, and changes to software. Past newsletters may be viewed by anyone.

• Format Descriptions
We maintain a variety of format description documents that are applicable to many of the datasets in our archive. Some of these formats include the GRIB and BUFR formats and various NMC formats.

• Land Station Definitions
This document, from the National Climatic Data Center, provides explanations for the different station categories that exist.

• Meteorological Equations
These documents contain information about the formulas used to compute some common meteorological parameters.

• Miscellaneous Papers
We have a selection of miscellaneous documents that may be of interest to some of the users of the RDA.

• NCAR Technical Notes
NCAR Technical Notes are manuscripts that contribute in specialized ways to the body of scientific knowledge. Many of our datasets have Technical Notes associated with them.