[R] opendap accessibility on Windows

[Christina Hernandez]

Hello,

I am working on a project where we are accessing large data files via opendap. Myself and two of the higher-ups on the project are working on Windows machines, and we have been unable to access remote files using the ncdf4 package. We have followed the package author's notes for installation on a Windows machine, and we have successfully installed the netcdf-4 libraries and the ncdf4 R package. However, the program still works only on local files. It is not an issue with connectivity of my machine since I am able to remotely access these same data files using Matlab.
I then attempted to follow the package author's notes on cross-compiling in a Linux environment, I was using a Ubuntu Virtual Box. These notes are available here: http://cirrus.ucsd.edu/~pierce/ncdf/how_to_build_on_windows.html
However, I do not really know what I'm doing and I was unable to successfully cross-compile the dependencies. Has anyone dealt with this on a Windows machine? Is there a different way to access remote files through R? \We have considered writing a Python script that can be run from within an R program, so that users that are only familiar with R can still access remote files without downloading a lot of large files.
Any advice is appreciated.


Christina Hernandez
Research Assistant
Ecosystem Modeling Lab
Gulf of Maine Research Institute
chernandez at gmri.org


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]