An interdisciplinary graduate student enrolled in a Climate and Society program explores the CMIP6 datasets that are available through a remote OPeNDAP server. She works to reproduce key figures in the newest IPCC report to better understand the scientific workflow when combining model output and observations.

An undergraduate major in biological oceanography works to identify geographically important regions of high primary productivity during springtime in the North Atlantic ocean. Primary productivity can be estimated from Chlorophyll A concentration [mg/m^3] measured by satellite imagery. They access freely available level 3 data products from the Suomi-NPP satellite hosted by OPeNDAP server.

As part of their senior year thesis, an undergraduate student compares sea surface height anomalies available from the ECCO (“Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean”) dataset and satellite Altimetry data from AVISO, to identify regions of low bias, i.e. regions where the ECCO data captures broad patterns of variability persistent in observations. Both datasets can be accessed and inspected remotely through diverse remote OPeNDAP servers simply with knowledge of each dataset’s URL.

A journalist writes an article about past occurrences of droughts across different cities in the continental United States, and potential correlations with air quality, pollution and rain precipitation changes. For that, he accesses gridded Palmer drought severity index data spanning since 1980, and all the relevant environmental data freely available from distributed OPeNDAP servers.

An oceanographer works to quantify and identify the dominant mechanisms driving high-frequency variability of cross-shelf transport across the Icelandic shelf break, as described in a peer-reviewed study that she recently read. She works to perform a high resolution regional simulation using realistic bathymetry and atmospheric forcing for the same time period as that of the study. She will use climatological data, like seawater temperature and salinity, to validate that her simulation reproduces the large-scale realistic features. Both climatology and observational data from the study can be found on distributed OPeNDAP servers.

A field campaign has successfully deployed surface instrumentation to sample the upper ocean along and across frontal regions, which are dynamically active regions with strong surface gradients in the temperature and/or salinity fields. This field campaign belongs to a multi-year project that resamples the same region and time of the year. The lead scientist uploads the data to an existing OPeNDAP server with all the necessary metadata and coordinate information so that anybody can reproduce their results.