Welcome to the
Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) and CDAWeb Archive

The Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) hosts the NASA non-solar heliophysics archive of current and past heliophysics missions and related ground-based and non-NASA data. The publicly-released data and other files are available via HTTPS spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/ and FTPS ftp://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/. FTP access is now only available through FTPS Readme. NASA solar data are held at the Solar Data Analysis Center (SDAC).

Unless otherwise noted, the content, data, documentation, code, and related materials associated with SPDF and its services is public domain and made available with a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) dedication. See SPDFs data use policy for further information. The archived data are publicly available at https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/ and https://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/. If you wish to cite SPDF, CDAWeb and its other services, please use: "NASA Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF); Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org), http://doi.org/10.17616/R3P301", usually followed by the date accessed.

The CDAWeb data service (at cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov) offers graphics, listing, subsetting and data computation services for a subset of the archived data.

Relocation of Directories on SPDF/CDAWeb and NSSDCFTP Services: On 2012 September 24-26, SPDF re-named and re-structured its FTP and HTTPS accessible directories to create a unified structure that merged in the legacy heliophysics data holdings previously served by the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) on nssdcftp.gsfc.nasa.gov. The responsibility for the final archiving of heliophysics data has been transferred from NSSDC to SPDF (for non-solar instruments) and to Solar Data Analysis Center (SDAC) (for solar instruments). SPDF will also serve some legacy solar instrument data for awhile.

A preliminary list of directories moved (current and new locations) is posted here. The list does not entirely reflect all of the final moves. Changes to CDAWeb data are listed first and the move from NSSDCftp is listed second.

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General ReadMe for the CDAWeb data directories:

DATA FILES:

Mission data are located in pub/data directories for each mission, with subdirectories for specific spacecraft and instruments, followed by dataset directories for each instrument, and finally yearly or day of year (doy) directories containing data files that are mostly in Common Data Format (CDF).

METADATA:

Many of these individual data files have incomplete internal descriptions of the physical meaning of their parameters. Better metadata can usually be found in what we call "master CDFs". Master CDFs are CDF files that contain only the metadata attributes for a given dataset and its variables; these metadata improve on and generally over-ride the metadata in the data files.

All public CDAWeb master CDFs can be downloaded from:
cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/software/cdawlib/0MASTERS
or their corresponding skeleton files:
cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/software/cdawlib/0SKELTABLES

PLOT/LIST/SUBSET DATA FILES:

All CDF files can be opened and read with the CDF distribution software found here . The content of these data files, joined with the master CDF metadata, is best accessed (plot, list in ASCII, file download of selected variables and times) using the CDAWeb user interface. These functions are also available via web services.

IDL USERS:

IDL users may also find useful the CDAWlib software library and the CDFX display and listing tool.

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