A system, method and computer-readable storage devices for providing an interface for an analytic service for Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) datasets. An example system for providing the service includes a data analytics platform of an assemblage of compute and storage nodes that provide a compute-storage fabric upon which high-performance parallel operations are performed over a collection of climate data stored in a distributed file system, a sequencer that transforms the climate data, a desequencer that transforms serialized block compressed sequence files between data formats. The system includes a services library of applications that dynamically create data objects from the data as reduced final results, and a utilities library of software applications that process flat serialized block compressed sequence files. The system also includes a service interface through which a client device can access the climate data via the data analytics platform.