Determine oce Variable Names from an NERC/BODC Names

Translate names in the NERC/BODC vocabulary to oce names, primarily so that read.netcdf() can produce more easily interpreted results. Please note that bodcNames2oceNames() handles only a tiny subset of the huge number of names in the NERC/BODC vocabulary (see Reference 1). To see the names that the function handles currently, type bodcNames2oceNames in an R session.

Usage

bodcNames2oceNames(bodcNames, unduplicate = TRUE)

Arguments

bodcNames

character vector that specifies variable names that use the NERC/BODC convention.

unduplicate

logical value indicating whether to rename repeated entries, so that e.g. if "temperature occurs twice, the second instance will be changed to "temperature2". Set this to FALSE if you plan are calling bodcNames2oceNames in a renaming function of your own, and call unduplicateNames() at the end of your function; see Example 2.

Value

bodcNames2oceNames returns a vector of the same length as its first argument, with translations to oce names, as appropriate. Note that the usual oce convention for handling duplicates is used, with the first name that maps to temperature being set to temperature, the next to temperature2, etc.

References

1. The NERC Environmental Data Server. http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/P01/current/

See also

Other functions that convert variable names to the oce convention: ODFNames2oceNames(), argoNames2oceNames(), metNames2oceNames(), woceNames2oceNames()

Author

Dan Kelley

Examples

# Example 1: typical usage
bodcNames2oceNames(c("PSALST01", "TEMPP901", "PRESPR01"))
#> [1] "salinity"    "temperature" "pressure"   

# Example 2: extend to add new variables
BODC2 <- function(originalNames) {
    rval <- bodcNames2oceNames(originalNames, unduplicate = FALSE)
    rval[rval == "bowler hat"] <- "hat"
    rval[rval == "top hat"] <- "hat"
    unduplicateNames(rval)
}
BODC2(c("PSALST01", "TEMPP901", "PRESPR01", "bowler hat", "top hat"))
#> [1] "salinity"    "temperature" "pressure"    "hat"         "hat2"