Academic Activity: ARGO FLOAT DATA VISUALIZATION USING ODV
Channel: Ilmu Kelautan Unpad
Date: 2020-09-23

Argo is an international program that collects information from inside the ocean using a fleet of robotic instruments that drift with the ocean currents and move up and down between the surface and a mid-water level.  Each instrument (float) spends almost all its life below the surface.  The data that Argo collects describes the temperature and salinity of the water and some of the floats measure other properties that describe the biology/chemistry of the ocean.  The main reason for collecting these data is to help us understand the oceans’ role in earth’s climate and so be able to make improved estimates of how it will change in the future. (for more, visit https://argo.ucsd.edu/about/) 


There are many softwares and tools that can be used to process the data from Argo Floats, one of the common ones is Ocean Data View (ODV). ODV is a computer program for the interactive exploration and graphical display of oceanographic and other geo-referenced profile, trajectory or time series data such as those obtained from Argo Floats. The software is available for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and UNIX systems. ODV data and settings files are platform independent and can be exchanged between all supported systems. Various types of graphics output can be produced easily, including high quality station maps, general property-property plots of one or more stations, scatter plots of selected stations, section plots along arbitrary cruise tracks and property distributions on general isosurfaces. (for more, visit https://odv.awi.de/documentation/) 


This tutorial will show you how to visualize the vertical and spatial distribution of temperature and salinity data obtained from the Argo Float instrument. The Argo Float data is openly available and can be accessed on many sites. In this tutorial, we will show you how to download the data from one of the Argo Float data provider, Coriolis (http://www.coriolis.eu.org/Data-Products/Data-Delivery/Data-selection)