New Discrete Water Sampling Spreadsheets Available
To provide context and comparison for data collected by OOI instrumentation, OOI collects and disseminates data collected by shipboard underway sensors and from water samples from CTD casts. Shipboard underway data can be accessed by using username and password ‘guest’ on the OOI Alfresco Document Management System, organized by cruise. Each cruise folder contains a Ship Data folder in the format provided by the ship operators and a Water Sampling subfolder. The Water Sampling subfolder includes scanned and digitized versions of the CTD logs, as well as, discrete water sample analyses in the formats provided by the labs which conducted the analyses.
Collecting water samples from the CTD rosette on the Pioneer 8 cruise aboard the R/V Neil Armstrong. ©WHOI.
To make these data more easily accessible to the science community, we have developed a common template to provide a full set of discrete water sample data from a cruise. These “Discrete_Sample_Summary” spreadsheets include the details for each Niskin bottle fired on a CTD cast, the CTD instrument rosette data from the time of bottle closure, and the water sample data and quality flags based on World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) standards.
These CSV files with common data formats can easily be read and manipulated in MATLAB, Python, or other computing programs and languages. Because water analysis data are received at different times from different labs, these spreadsheets are updated as data become available. An accompanying README file contains version history, general notes, and a description of the quality flags. The original spreadsheets from labs, which may contain additional data and methodology, will also be posted.
An example of how to read and use this discrete sample data can be found in this Jupyter notebook. Discrete_Sample_Summary spreadsheets have been posted for the Regional Cabled Array cruises 6-10, the Coastal Endurance Array cruises 1-13, and the Global Irminger Sea Array cruises 1-6. We will continue to work on completing spreadsheets for past cruises as well as cruises going forward.
Comparison of dissolved oxygen data on the Washington Shelf Surface Mooring with water sampling data from Endurance Cruise 13. Data from Deployment 10 and Deployment 11 are plotted together, and overlap during 5-7 July.