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Quickstart — your first AQUAVIEW query

Confirm your client is connected and the catalog is responding. Two minutes from cold start to your first dataset.

What this teaches

  • How to verify AQUAVIEW is wired up
  • The shape of list_collections and search_datasets results
  • How to ask follow-up questions in plain English

Sources used: any (uses list_collections + a free-text search_datasets)

Prompt

List the AQUAVIEW collections. Then find me one example dataset from
NDBC, one from GADR, and one from GOES_R, with a one-sentence summary
of each.

Transcript

1. Enumerate collections

list_collections()

Returns 68 rows including id, title, bbox, keywords, and a description.

2. Sample item from each requested source

search_datasets(collections = "NDBC", limit = 1)
search_datasets(collections = "GADR", limit = 1)
search_datasets(collections = "GOES_R", limit = 1)

Live responses (NDBC has 1,506 items, GADR has 15,469, GOES_R has 203):

Collection Example item ID What it is
NDBC ndbc_grcm4 GLRC Observatory in Lake Superior, owned by Michigan Tech — full meteorology + water quality (chlorophyll, dissolved O2, pH, turbidity) + waves
GADR argo_nmdis_2901633 Argo profiling float deployed by China NMDIS; 6,840 obs in the western North Pacific (131–139°E, 25–28°N), pressure to 2029 dbar, temperature -2.0 to 30.9 °C
GOES_R goes19_abi_l2_ctpf GOES-19 ABI Cloud Top Pressure (full disk) — derived from infrared channels

Result the agent gave

"AQUAVIEW has 68 collections covering ocean, atmospheric, and marine data from NOAA, IOOS, the World Ocean Database, ESA, IFREMER, and dozens of other institutions.

Three sample datasets, one per requested collection:

  • ndbc_grcm4 (NDBC) — the GLRC Observatory buoy in Lake Superior, owned by Michigan Tech. It's a full instrument suite: meteorology (air temp, pressure, wind), wave height + period, plus water-quality channels including chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen, pH, salinity, and turbidity.
  • argo_nmdis_2901633 (GADR) — an Argo profiling float deployed by China NMDIS in the western North Pacific. Across its lifetime it recorded 6,840 observations down to ~2029 dbar with temperatures spanning -2.0 °C to 30.9 °C and salinity 29.3 to 34.9.
  • goes19_abi_l2_ctpf (GOES_R) — a GOES-19 ABI Cloud Top Pressure full-disk product, derived from infrared channels by NOAA NESDIS and hosted on Google Cloud Storage."

Variations

  • Replace any of NDBC, GADR, GOES_R with another collection ID — try NEXRAD_L2, WOD, or MARACOOS.
  • Ask for a CSV summary: "Format the result as a Markdown table."
  • Ask the model to call aggregate(collection_frequency) instead — it will return per-source item counts across the entire catalog.