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Surface meteorological forcing downscaled from NLDAS-2 and StageIV over the continental United States

Download Google Drive data on Linux systems

For large-scale and/or automatic downloads from Google Drive, Linux can be a great choice. Also, most research computing systems are Linux based today. There are more than a few Linux tools for Google Drive if you search the internet about it. We recommend rclone because it's free and provides the command-line tools that you can easily integrate into your scripts.

Install rclone

The official instructions can be found here: https://rclone.org/install/

  • If you have admin privilege on the system, you can download the generic or distro-specific rclone installation package from https://rclone.org/downloads/ and go from there.

  • If you don't have admin privilege, we recommend installing it from Miniconda. If you don't have Miniconda yet, download and install it following instructions on its official website https://conda.io/miniconda.html. With Miniconda installed, you can install rclone with the command: conda install rclone.

Configure rclone for Google Drive

The official instructions can be found here: https://rclone.org/drive/

  • If your Linux system has a web browser installed (Firefox in most cases), open it up and follow instructions on the official page above.

  • If your Linux system doesn't have a web browser, we recommend you find another machine that has both rclone and a web browser and follow the same official instructions above but answer "N" to the "auto config" question.

Use auto config?

* Say Y if not sure

* Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine

y) Yes (default)

n) No

y/n> n

You will be prompted to paste a command to you other machine that does have rclone and web browser. That will initiate the same Google login/authorization procedure and provide you a token, which you can use to finish the config.

Download Google Drive data

First, login to your Google account in a web browser, and then click the link on our website to the Google Drive folder for the data you want, for example, GRADES discharge and runoff. This will add the data folder to your "Shared with me" area in your Google Drive. Suppose your Google Drive remote is named "GoogleDrive" in the rclone configuration, the following command will download the entire data folder:

rclone sync --drive-shared-with-me GoogleDrive:GRADES ./GRADES

To check the content of the data folder, you can do:

rclone lsf --drive-shared-with-me GoogleDrive:GRADES

Contact Ming Pan m3pan@ucsd.edu for questions.