Pioneer MAB Profiler – New Python Notebook Activity

A new example Python notebook activity

Have you ever wanted to play with profiler data from the NSF OOI?

For simple exploration, the OOI Data Explorer is a great way to browse and quickly plot profiler data.  (There are currently over 5,800 profiling datasets in the system!)  You can use the site to select specific instruments, narrow in on time ranges, and even hover over the timeseries plots to see thumbnails of individual profiles.  The Data Explorer can’t do everything, but it is a great tool to find interesting datasets and events of interest.

If you want to dive deeper into the data, that’s where a bit of programming comes in handy.

In this new example python notebook, originally developed for our Wilmington workshop, we feature some of the early data from the Pioneer MAB Array Southeastern Profiler Mooring.

With a few snippets of code, this notebook demonstrates how to:

• Use erddapy to download a month of profiler data from the OOI data server
• Make a quick scatterplot that visualizes a timeseries of profiles
• Make a more advance profile timeseries figure that includes 3 variables (temperature, salinity and chlorophyll)
• Subset profiles for a single date or even an individual profile
• Create a figure showing vertical profiles of temperature, salinity, and chlorophyll
• Plot a profile dataset on a TS (temperature-salinity) diagram, with lines of constant density.

This notebook is really just a prototype. It includes some example code along with a few orientation and interpretation questions at the end, which can be used to guide students as they develop data descriptions based on the plots. If you would like to use this notebook with your students, we strongly suggest adapting the code, plots, and questions to meet your course needs.

You can view the Pioneer MAB Profiler notebook on GitHub, or open it up directly on Google Collab to run it yourself.

Our goal is to continue developing new notebooks for the community over the next year to showcase NSF OOI data and how they might be integrated into classroom activities. We hope you’ll check out this new example, and please let Sage know what you think!