ECCO output on NASA Earthdata¶
Introduction¶
Until the early 2020s, ECCO state estimate output was available mostly through ECCO Drive or other locally-hosted websites for individual products. While ECCO Drive is still functional and contains an assortment of ECCO output, ECCO version 4 release 4 is the first to be released on NASA Earthdata by the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC). This comes with a number of benefits, including higher storage capacity (e.g., for daily mean output), detailed metadata conforming to Climate and Forecast (CF) conventions, and rapid access to data within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.
It is possible to download ECCO output through the NASA Earthdata website in your browser, by searching the collections and filtering for datasets in the ECCO project. But it can be time-consuming to find the variables that you need, in a certain time range, spatial subset, etc. This is where the ecco_access Python package is useful.
Here we take a look at how ECCO output is structured in NASA Earthdata, and set up your login credentials to work with ecco_access.
ECCO output structure on Earthdata¶
On PO.DAAC and in the NASA Earthdata Cloud, ECCO output is organized in the following hierarchy:
Dataset: Typically contains a few variables, spanning the time range of the ECCO output (1992-2017 for version 4 release 4). Most datasets are divided (in the time dimension) into hundreds or thousands of granules.
Granule: A collection of dataset variables at a specific time (monthly mean, daily mean, or snapshot). Exceptions are 1-D time series where the entire dataset only consists of one granule.
Variable: A specific geophysical parameter (or flux) representing the state of the ocean, atmosphere, or sea ice/snow cover. Individual variables are not visible through the NASA Earthdata website, but can be seen after a granule file has been opened.
Each dataset has a dataset code called a ShortName which is used to identify it on the cloud. In order to download particular variable(s), you need to identify the ShortName associated with the dataset containing those variables. You can search for the variables in the linked text files below, or download these files for your reference.
ECCO dataset and variable lists¶
Version 4 release 4¶
ECCO v4r4 llc90 Grid Dataset Variables - Monthly Means
ECCO v4r4 llc90 Grid Dataset Variables - Daily Means
ECCO v4r4 llc90 Grid Dataset Variables - Daily Snapshots
ECCO v4r4 0.5-Deg Interp Grid Dataset Variables - Monthly Means
ECCO v4r4 0.5-Deg Interp Grid Dataset Variables - Daily Means
ECCO v4r4 Time Series and Grid Parameters
Note that unlike earlier releases of ECCO v4, in v4r4 all monthly mean variables are also available for download as daily means. Snapshots (typically at daily intervals) are available for a few variables, and can be used to help close budgets as shown in later tutorials.
Version 4 release 5¶
(As of October 2025, only available when working in the AWS Cloud)
ECCO v4r5 llc90 Grid Dataset Variables - Monthly Means
ECCO v4r5 llc90 Grid Dataset Variables - Daily Means
ECCO v4r5 llc90 Grid Dataset Variables - Daily Snapshots
ECCO v4r5 0.5-Deg Interp Grid Dataset Variables - Monthly Means
ECCO v4r5 0.5-Deg Interp Grid Dataset Variables - Daily Means