Search for products help page

The ‘Search for Products’ utility is to support the user of the Cesar Database in finding the products of interest. Each dataset is characterised by one or more Keywords, the categories it belongs to and the time period the data cover.

Time period:

The unit of search is set to a single day. If data are stored in daily or sub-daily files there is a simple one to one relation when a search on time period is included. All files that contain data within in the selected period will be reported in the search results. The default search period is from the earliest entry in the database up to the present day.

Some datasets are stored on monthly or even yearly files. In that case the data provider has included a boolean variable valid_days (an array) in the datafile which indicates whether or not data for any day in the month or year covered by the file is included in the file. In this case the search result is almost similar to the search result for daily files. If any data are available within the selected time period the corresponding monthly or yearly file will be listed. However it is not possible to see if a specific day of the month or year is available, unless one does a search on that single day.

Example:
There is a monthly file for surface meteo variables (december 2006) that contains data only for the period up to 11th of december.

• you select search period: 15-12-2006 till 31-12-2006: the search result will not list the dataset
• you select search period: 09-12-2006 till 31-12-2006: the search research will be listed with 2 hits

If you click on the i to the right of a dataset listed in the search result list, the metadata of the dataset can be viewed. If you click on the dataset itself, all the products (hits) will be listed. If you click in that list on a single product details of the product will be shown, and if available also the associated quicklook.

Keywords:

The data provider or principal investigator characterizes the dataset with one or more keywords. The keyword list is based on the WMO keyword list. Multiple keywords can be used in the search, but multiple keywords are always treated as a logical AND search.

Arguments:

Each day has been characterized by a certain number of parameters, e.g. the maximum daily temperature, accumulated precipitation, mean wind speed at 200 m. etc. These parameters are calculated from data collected at the Cesar observatory. Therefore not all parameters are continuously available for the whole period covered by the Cesar Database. Using this argument search will give as result only dataproducts for which the selected arguments are available and fall within the selected range (min-max). Up to three arguments can be selected which are always treated as a logical AND search.

Category:

Another search or browse option is the use of the category list. Each dataset is characterized by the categories it belongs too. Multiple categories are defined e.g. by institute, by measurement type, by main focus, etc. Click on the categories link on the right hand side to go to the categories browse page.