Instructions to access data from MY NASA DATA Live Access Server

Go to the Web site:

  1. Start with the Live Access Server (Basic Edition). The intermediate and advanced editions can be used later for different cloud parameters. This example was created using Firefox version 6.0. Explorer 9 on a Windows 7 machine did not work with the LAS when these instructions were created.
  2. Click on Choose dataset in the top left.
  3. A popup window will appear. Click on clouds, and then choose Monthly Low Cloud Coverage.
  4. Go to the world map. Click on the area for analysis and drag it to the center of the square.
  5. Choose the zoom in tool. It is marked with + sign. Click once or twice to get closer to the area for analysis.
  6. Click on the square to the left of the + sign. This is the Select Region with Click and Drag tool.
  7. Go back to the map, click and drag the cursor to form a rectangle over the area for analysis.
  8. Under Scatter Plots in the lower left, choose Property-Property.
  9. Now two parameters can be evaluated at once. Go back to the top and choose Monthly High Cloud Coverage on the vertical axis.
  10. Under Line Plots click on Time Series.
  11. Click on Update Plot at the top left. A Line plot should then appear and show both the Monthly Low and High Cloud Coverage (percent).

Export to Explorer.

  1. To the right of center at the top click on Show Values. Click OK. (Note: we have not chosen Save As, as it did not work when choosing to save as an ASCII file).
  2. Four columns of digits should appear with Mean low cloud amount (%) at the top.
  3. Click and drag to highlight the Low and high cloud percentages. Copy these values.
  4. Paste these values into a blank Word file.
  5. Use Save As and then choose Plain Text file. Choose “Insert Line Breaks” if prompted.
  6. Open a new Excel file (note, this was done on a Windows 7 machine using Office 2010).
  7. Import the word file. Using Excel 2010, click on Data, then choose Get External Data from Text.
  8. If all has gone well, you should see four to five columns in the Excel file. You are now free to create yearly averages for comparisons.
  9. You can now experiment with other variables, for example, choosing the Intermediate server will allow you to compare Monthly Cloud Coverage with Monthly Cloud Temperature.