[THREDDS #IMM-856712]: Height subsetting for NetCDF Subset Service (NCSS)

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the suggestions. I've moved this into our tracking system for 
consideration for inclusion in a future release.

Ethan

Rich Signell wrote:
> TDS Developer Gurus,
> 
> The NetCDF Subset Service (NCSS) in TDS is great for people who just
> want to extract part of a dataset and save it locally as a NetCDF
> file.  It's great to be able to subset by lon/lat values and time
> (X,Y,T), but how about also adding the ability to subset by
> height/depth (Z)?
> 
> A common use case in oceanography is that folks just need the surface
> layer currents from a model with many vertical layers  to track things
> that stay at the surface (oil, larvae, search & rescue, etc).
> 
> So it would be great if, for example, one could use NCSS to extract
> just the surface layer (Depth: z=0) from this dataset:
> <http://edac-dap3.northerngulfinstitute.org/thredds/ncss/grid/ncom_useast_agg/US_East_Aggregation_best.ncd/dataset.html>
> instead of being forced to get all 40 layers!
> 
> As additional minor suggestions for the NCSS GUI, I think the
> interface would benefit by
> 
> 1) dropping the "all" radio buttons from the "Choose Spatial Subset"
> and "Choose Time Subset" selections.   The service already populates
> the bounding box and start/stop times with the min/max extents of the
> spatial and time coordinates, so just leaving the limits alone would
> give you "all".   I've seen several users change the limits to subset,
> but forget to change the radio button from "all" to "subset", and then
> have the request fail because they asked for too much data by mistake,
> not realizing that the subset values they typed in were not activated.
> 
> 2) turning "on" by default the "add Lon/Lat to file".    Most people
> want  the coordinate variables!  Not sure why there is an option to
> leave off (by default even!) the lon/lat (X,Y) coordinate variables,
> when there is no option to leave off the time (T) and depth (Z)
> variables.
> 
> 3) Put a "1" in the "Horizontal Stride" box by default instead of
> leaving it empty.
> 
> 4) Add a "Time Stride" box, and give it a default value of "1".
> 
> 5) Add a "Height Stride" box, and give it a default value of "1".
> 
> I guess that's enough suggestions for now.   ;-)
> 
> Thanks,
> Rich
> --
> Dr. Richard P. Signell
> USGS

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: IMM-856712
Department: Support THREDDS
Priority: High
Status: Open