CDP Tutorial
Step #1: Select CDP Data Servers

After launching the CDP client for you particular platform (from a command line, double-clicking the app icon, selecting from the Start menu, etc...) you will see the CDP client interface positioned to the first step of the search process:

At this point you can simply click the Next button to choose the checked servers in the scrolling list in the lower left of the panel. In the above illustration, the Server list shows four available servers. Note that this list will grow or shrink as CDP servers are added or if a particular server(s) is temporarily off line. You can refine your selection of datasets by checking/unchecking the servers listed and/or by modifying the directory search by using the Select Time Range, Select Location, and/or Select Keywords criteria. Note that if you use multiple selection criteria they will act as if they have been logically ANDed together. That is, datasets will have to meet the time range criteria and the location criteria, and the keyword criteria.

Changing Location: You can change the geographic region that CDP uses to search for datasets by changing the Location criterion. You can either draw a new rectangular region on the small world map or type in latitude and/or longitude ranges in the text boxes to change the location criterion:

To return the location criterion to its default values (the whole world), click the Set Default Selection Range button.

Changing Time Range: There are two ways to enter a new time criterion. You can type in a new date/time string in the approved format (yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss), or click the small elipsis (...) buttom next to either the From or To fields to build up a new date/time from using a clickable calendar:

After you are done constructing your date/time, click OK and a string in the correct format will be added to the text field.

Keyword Search: The directory server stores a significant amount of keyword information on individual data sets. The complete list of kewyords is listed here. As you start typing in the keywords field, a list will pop up to show words that match what you have typed so far:

Here, the user has typed "tempe" and the popup list has expanded this to "temperature". Press the space bar to have the wizard finish typing for you. Keywords can be connected by logical operators including AND, OR, and NOT to more precisely specify what you kind of data sets you are interested in:

In this example, the user has specified that datasets must contain temperature and salinity variables.