Detailed Instructions for Aerosol Data Retrieval
If you are using a World-Wide-Web browser such as Mosaic or Netscape, you should be able to download most of our online data. You can get to the data in a few different ways:
- From the Aerosol Group home page, you may click on any of the
stations. This will give you information on that station and ways to retrieve
the data.
- If you wish to retrieve only the most recent data, you simply need to click on aerosol data under as a data file under Most Recently Processed Data. This will download a file called latest.zip to you.
- Clicking on via Anonymous FTP under Clean and Averaged Data connect you to our FTP server, which will display a listing of files available for that station. Clicking on any of these files should download that file to you.
The above two scenarios may require you to set your browser to save to disk mode (usually in one of the main menus of your browser). This forces the next item you click on to be downloaded to your disk. You should only need to do this if your browser tries to actually display one of these datafiles on your screen, in which case you will see a bunch of garbage.
- If you wish to retrieve data from more than one station, it will be easier
for you to go to the Aerosol Group home page and click on Go
to the Aerosol Anonymous FTP data archive under Data Retrieval.
This will present you with many directories corresponding to specific stations
and a few other files, notably the README file. Please click
on this file first and read it. To download data, click on the directory of
the corresponding station, and you will be presented with files you may download.
Again, you may need to set your browser to save to disk mode before you actually click on the file you wish to download.
If the above method does not work for you, try using FTP directly.
At a command prompt at your machine type the following:
ftp ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov
When asked for a login ID, type anonymous
When asked for a password, type your e-mail address (nothing will be displayed as you type)
at the prompt, type:
bin
then,
dir
You will see a listing of files and directories. Change to the directory of the station you wish by doing the following:
cd brw (or lar, wsa, etc)
then,
dir
You will now see a listing of files available for download from this station. To retrieve a file, type
recv (filename)
The file will be copied to your machine. If your machine does not like the names of our files, you may name it whatever you like as:
recv (filename) (name you want to call it on your machine)
The above are the simplest ways of retrieving our data. If you have no access to either of these methods, we can arrange to e-mail data to you.
For more information, e-mail to: John.A.Ogren@noaa.gov.