5. Using the ESA CCI Toolbox with the xcube Viewer

The ESA CCI Toolbox does not come with a dedicated User Interface. However, apart from the options to plot its data in Jupyter Notebooks (as is extensively shown in the jupyter_notebooks section), you can also open view datasets in an instance of xcube viewer. There is a Notebook which explains how to do this in a Jupyter environment. However, for some cases this might not be the ideal solution, as you might want to run a server for a longer time than the lifespan of a Jupyter Notebook. For these cases, you may set up a specific xcube server configuration. If you are not familiar with these, we suggest you read the corresponding sections in the xcube documentation.

To access datasets provided by the toolbox, you may then design the data stores section to look like this:

DataStores:
  - Identifier: cci
    StoreId: esa-cci
      Datasets:
        - Path: "esacci.AEROSOL.mon.L3.AAI.multi-sensor.multi-platform.MSAAI.1-7.r1"
          Title: "Monthly Aerosol"
          StoreOpenParams:
            variable_names: ['absorbing_aerosol_index']
            time_range: ['2005-01-01', '2005-12-31']
            bbox: [-23.4, -40.4, 57.4, 40.4]
  - Identifier: cci-zarr
    StoreId: esa-cci-zarr
      Datasets:
        - Path: "*SNOW*"

This section will load in the dataset with the identifier esacci.AEROSOL.mon.L3.AAI.multi-sensor.multi-platform.MSAAI.1-7.r1, subset to the given opening parameters. From the zarr store, it will load in any datasets with the term SNOW in it.