Feature request for "NCSS grid as point" interface

[marceloandrioni]

Hello, I would like to make some suggestions for the "NCSS grid as point" interface.

• Option of a clickable map that also shows the grid points in high zoom levels. This would be useful when choosing a grid point near the water/land interface. The NCAR RDA request page has a good layout of how this option would look like, including an options that selects the 4 grid points around the desired location (useful to perform a bilinear interpolation after).

• Option to include expressions (in the catalog?) to create new variables based on existing variables, e.g.: u and v components to speed an direction.

One of my responsibilities is to maintain a TDS server in a private corporate network. Most of the users don't have a meteorology/oceanographic background, so even "simple" conversions like u/v to spd/dir can be problematic for "layman" users. I vaguely remember that this was possible using F-TDS, but I dont't think this works with v5. To not overload the server, as the computations would be done server side and not client side, simple calculations like atan2 and unit conversion (Kelvin to degC) would be enough. No need to allow time/spatial averages, as that would consume a lot of resources.

Something similar was done in ERDDAP 2.10, but only for "table" datasets. The topic is under "NEW: Script SourceNames / Derived Variables in ..."

• Option to include json to the format list. I think this would help the adoption of "NCSS grid as point" as a API in other systems.

• A "select all" and "unselect all" under the Variables Selection section.

Thank you very much.