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Overview
EPIC was developed at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory
to manage the large numbers of hydrographic and time series
oceanographic in-situ data sets collected as part of
NOAA climate study programs, such as EPOCS and TOGA in earlier
years, WOCE and CLIVAR and others more recently. At present,
PMEL maintains more than 1.5 million individual data sets in
the EPIC data base. This data is available on-line to researchers
inside PMEL on the desktop and on the Web
via PMEL's internal Intranet. Portions of the data are freely
available outside PMEL via the World Wide Web. EPIC toolkits
have also been used to manage and display the real-time data
such as TOGA-TAO
buoy data, which provides remote users with interactive
access to real-time data.
EPIC Data Sets
Data types include CTD, XBT, bottle data, time series from
moored instruments, shipboard ADCP data, drifting buoy data,
and sea level data. Data files are self-documenting and machine
transportable. Multiple data file formats include netCDF data
format, Classic EPIC format, and formatted ASCII data format
are supported for access from C and Fortran by the EPIC
System Library (EPSLIB). Detailed information about how
to create EPIC data filese are available including the EPIC
implementation of the Unidata netCDF format.
EPIC Database Management
EPIC in-situ data residing on UNIX workstation disks can be
managed with any SQL database system such as Ingres,
mSQL, postgreSQL, or MySQL database.
The EPIC metadata, the information about the data, stored in
the databases, can be accessed using a command-line interactive
program, World Wide Web browsers, or
a Motif-based X-window application
that allows users to locate data in the underlying databases
by specific selection constraints such as geographic, time,
depth range, etc. These applications communicate with back-end
databases, making it easy and convenient for remote users as
well as local users to access EPIC data. Refer to EPIC
database page for detailed information about EPIC database
management.
EPIC Programs and Utilities
EPIC system contains a full suite of routines provide graphical
display, data analysis and calculation of oceanographic parameters,
such as dynamic height, geostrophic velocity, potential density,
statistics, spectral analysis, coherences, correlations, and
EOFs. EPIC data sets can be used with these EPIC
programs (Unix and VAX/VMS), with C or Fortran programs
using the EPSLIB I/O library,
with the MATLAB MexEPS interface,
and can be made available on the World Wide Web with the EPIC
Web Utilities. Many Java
applications and tools are also available for data access
and display.
Obtaining EPIC
EPIC is freely available for Unix and for
VAX/VMS. Elements of EPIC are in use at many oceanographic
institutes, and the PMEL team welcomes
collaboration and software exchange with others using any of
the system elements.
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