The first step in locating items in the data set is to scan the list of experiments and examine the charts to identify projects that match an geographic region of interest or a specific time. For example, if a user is researching winter storms on Georges Bank, there are three experiments that may contain measurements of interest (Georges Bank, GLOBEC Georges Bank, or GLOBEC Great South Channel). Because the GLOBEC Georges Bank experiment was carried out in summer, only the first and third are experiments of interest. Follow the links to the two pages describing the experiments and then click "Basic Sampling Interval" to view the catalogue of raw data files available. If currents in the upper 10 meters of the ocean are desired, data meeting this criterion are available only in the GLOBEC Great South Channel experiment. In that experiment's table of files, 4831a-a.nc, 4831b-a.nc, 4841v-a.nc, 4901-a.nc, and 4931-a.nc may be of interest. These files can be downloaded by clicking on the file name, then choosing to "save to disk" for use with local tools.

The OPenDAP version of the data are not viewable from the table, but can be accessed from the level above by following the "Data Access via DODS" link, then clicking on the file name selected in the directory list to display the metadata associated with the file. A text version of a variable can be displayed on this page, if the box by the variable name is selected and the "Get ASCII" button is pressed. Users may also access the OPenDAP data directly, without downloading, using the URL (http://stellwagen.er.usgs.gov/cgi-bin/nph-dods/DATAFILES/MBAY_LT/file_name_of interest.nc) in their client application.

Some of the data reports (see appendix 3; publications are also cited on the experiments web pages) may provide additional ways to locate data files of interest. For example, Butman and others (2004) provide a figure showing mooring number as a function of time and depth for the data collected in Massachusetts Bay.