The Data cube has evolved past its elementary roots as raw file structures into a dynamic queryable database. If you are unfamiliar with this interface, this short tutorial should help you get a grasp on what you can do with this mechanism.
There are three ways to query the Data cube Database:
by Site,
by Project,
and by Date.
Though it is possible to submit the query form with nothing selected, it is highly recommended that you limit your parameters, as an empty query will match every file in the Data cube; just listing all of these files takes a long time (several minutes).
As a first step, limit your query to a subset of Sites. Alternatively, you may be looking for similar data across a wide range of sites, in which case you might select one project and leave the Sites completely unselected.
Narrow your search by selecting one or more projects. You may find that using queries against certain projects do not return any files. This is not an error; it is due to the fact that not all sites have participated in all projects. Some projects are nearly equivalent and have different names, others were short lived and are not collecting data anymore.
The time clause of a Data cube query has four elements. The first element is an operator. You can choose to query a date equal to, less than or equal to, greater than or equal to, less than or greater than the following date.
The rest of the date clause can be chosen by the pull down menus for year, month, and day. A second clause row is provided to allow ranges of dates.
After submitting the query form (by clicking 'submit') you will be presented with a list of linked URL's to files which match your query.
Depending on the amount of data your query returns, you may have to wait a few moments while the Data cube computes the total size of the data returned.
Once the size is returned a button will appear at the bottom of the page which will allow you to download all the data files in one convenient tarball. Currently, for convenience sake, file hierarchies are not preserved in the tar archives dispensed. This may change in the future.
