Data types provided by OceanAnalysis

OA is the foundational base for all the OceanAnalysis data types. In each of those derived types, there are two elements: (1) a Dict named metadata and (2) a DataFrame, Matrix, or some other data-containing object named data.

The following outlines the available types and the principle functions relating to them.

• Amsr holds data from AMSR satellites. The metadata item is a Dict that holds information about the data source and sampling time. The data item is a matrix holding the requested field. See read_amsr for reading such files and plotting their contents.

• Ctd holds hydrographic data, either from plain CTD instruments or from Argo profilers. In each case, the metadata item holds information about the data (such as the position and time of sampling), and the data item is a DataFrame with columns named salinity, temperature and pressure, along (in some cases with other columns in the data file). The following functions return Ctd values: as_ctd, read_ctd_cnv, and read_argo. Objects of type Ctd may be plotted with plot_profile and plot_TS.

• Coastline holds coastline shapes. The metadata item is a Dict that holds the name of the file from which the data were read (or an indication that the data were user-supplied directly). The data item is a DataFrame with columns named longitude and latitude. Note that the former is in the 0-360 degree range for the built-in datasets. See the documentation for coastline for reading and plotting such data.

• Topography holds topographic information. The metadata item is a Dict holding items named "longitude" and "latitude". The data item is a matrix of earth height above mean sea level, in metres. Topographic files in NetCDF format may be accessed or downloaded with get_topography_file, and read with read_topography.