Many environmental science research and applications require information about climate and other aspects of the environment. The good news is that a huge amount of climate data is available, covering the whole of the Earth surface. The bad news is that even the experts find it very difficult to find the data they need, and to extract the information they need from that data: locate potential data sets, negotiate permissions, download huge files, make sense of the file formats, get to grips with yet another library, filter, interpolate, regrid, etc. These hurdles can significantly slow, or even prevent, the eventual utilisation of the data.
FetchClimate is a fast, free, intelligent climate data retrieval service that operates over the cloud to return only the climate data you need. FetchClimate can be accessed either through a simple web interface, or via a few lines of code inside any .NET program. FetchClimate is intended to make it easy for you to retrieve data for any geographical region, at any grid resolution: from global, through continental, to a few kilometres, and for any range of years (1900 – 2010), days within the year, and / or hours within the day. FetchClimate can also return information on the uncertainty associated with the climate data and data sources used to fulfil the request. When multiple sources of data could potentially provide data on the same environmental variable FetchClimate automatically selects the most appropriate data sources. Finally, the entire query you ran can be shared as a single url, enabling others to retrieve the identical data.
Project lead institution:
