The IRI Data Library is a powerful and freely accessible online data repository and analysis tool that allows a user to view, manipulate, and download over 400 climate-related data sets through a standard web browser. The Data Library contains a wide variety of publicly available data sets, including station and gridded atmospheric and oceanic observations and analyses, model-based analyses and forecasts, and land surface and vegetation data sets, from a range of sources. It includes a flexible, interactive data viewer that allows a user to visualize. multi-dimensional data sets in several combinations, create animations, and customize and download plots and maps in a variety of image formats. The Data Library is also a powerful computational engine that can perform analyses of varying complexity using an extensive array of statistical analysis tools. Online tutorials and function documentation are available to aid the user in applying these tools to the holdings available in the Data Library. Data sets and the results of any calculations performed by the user can be downloaded in a wide variety of file formats, from simple ascii text to GIS-compatible files to fully self-describing formats, or transferred directly to software applications that use the OPeNDAP protocol. This flexibility allows the Data Library to be used as a collaborative tool among different disciplines and to build new data discovery and analysis tools.
