You can't do science if you don't have data.
We have loads of data that we make accessible to the Earth system science community, from observations taken during NCAR-supported field campaigns to images of the Sun's corona, and everything in between.
We also have tools and resources to help you understand the strengths, limitations, and applications of the data as well as software to help you analyze and visualize it.
RDA is a large, diverse collection of meteorological and oceanographic observations, operational and reanalysis model outputs, and ancillary datasets, such as topography/bathymetry, vegetation, and land use data. The archive contains more than 600 curated data sets.
NCAR maintains archives for over 400 field campaigns, dating back to the GHOST (Global HOrizontal Sounding Technique) Balloon Program, which ran from 1966 to 1977. The data sets are accessible through the Earth Observing Lab (EOL).
Find data generated by our global and regional climate models, including ensembles of runs from our Community Earth System Model.
Data collected from the corona-observing instruments located at MLSO are archived by NCAR's High Altitude Observatory. Observations include white light corona, emission corona, H-alpha, photometric, helium, and more.
The guide, an NCAR community project, provides concise and reliable information on the strengths and limitations of the key observational data sets, tools, and methods used to evaluate Earth system models and to understand the climate system.
NCAR's Digital Assets Services Hub (DASH) can provide guidance on data management and planning, best practices for data and metadata, and more.
GDEX distributes and preserves open-access data from diverse sources, including data that underlie publications by NCAR staff, and data from external NSF-funded projects and facilities.
GeoCAT provides data analysis and visualization tools for Earth System Science data in the scientific Python ecosystem.
DART is an orchestrated collection of programs, scripts, and tools that supports data assimilation for many different kinds of geophysical models, including nearly all NCAR-based community models and many types of observations. DART can also be used as a teaching tool.
NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory makes available a range of public software packages that are useful for research aircraft, data acquisition, radar and lidar observations, soundings, and more.
UCAR's Unidata is a community data facility for the Earth system sciences, sharing geoscience data and tools to access and visualize that data. More than 700 academic and research institutions form the core of the community; worldwide, more than 3,000 educational, government, and research institutions rely on Unidata technologies.
Visit UCARUnidata serves up forecast model output as well as satellite data, radar data, lightning data, and more in near real time.
Unidata offers a number of software packages for analyzing and visualizing data, as well as for management and access. These include Unidata's popular Integrated Data Viewer (IDV).
Help obtaining data and using software comes in a variety of forms, from trainings and workshops to software documentation and topical community mailing lists.
At NCAR and UCAR, it's a priority to make research results and other digital assets publicly accessible in a unified way. The digital assets encompass NCAR's vast store of knowledge about the atmospheric, solar, and related Earth system sciences in categories such as publications, models and tools, support software, images, and measurements from satellites, airborne, and ground-based instruments.
To that end, a group of software engineers, scientists, and curators from across NCAR and UCAR are working together as the Data Stewardship Engineering Team (DSET).
The NCAR Directorate created the DSET to lead the organization’s efforts to provide user-focused services relating to NCAR and UCAR Community Programs (UCP) digital assets. DSET relies on cross-organization participation, and its members represent each NCAR Lab, the NCAR Library, and UCP. Currently, a minimum of one representative has been named from each of these units by their director.
