Ocean Data View 4.0
Murray Brown · Oceanography · 1998
Ocean Data View, a multiple-variable graphical analysis and display package for oceanographic station data (station metadata, temperature, salinity, nutrients, others), compatible with several commonly used international marine data formats, is reviewed.Standard derived variables or those based on user-provided formulas can be displayed.Station charts, station data profiles, multi-variable scatter plats, section profiles, and surface plots (one variable plotted on a specific value of any other variable) can be created easily within a user-specified physical layout of Cartesian frames.Plotted data is easily gridded and/or contoured in nearly all views.he Holy Grail of oceanware, a really good, five-cent Windows data browser, has finally appeared: Ocean Data View!When word spread this past winter that Reiner Schlitzer at the Alfred Wegener Institute-Bremerhaven had released a sensational new graphic program for marine data (http://www.awi-bremerhaven.de/GPH/ODV/),this reviewer wasted no time in downloading and testing it.My intention was just to see if it really worked, and --if so --could it handle some of the analysis and quality control lessons we offer in Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) training classes.Ocean Data View (ODV), now on version 4.0.4,turned out to be a powerful, versatile, yet easy-to-use package that instantly transforms this klutziest of users into a savvy hydrographer (well, almost).ODV is now my program of choice --its overall design, simplicity, capabilities and compatibilities set a high water mark in oceanware that will be hard to match.I've heard about folks who are absolutely addicted to another browser, OceanAtlas (Swift, J. et al; http: / / odf.ucsd.edu/ OceanAtlas / ), and have seen the outstanding examples of its work in Mattias Tomczak's web-published lecture notes (http://gaea.es.flinders-.edu.au/ -mattom / ES1 / contents.html).But the OceanAtlas is a Macintosh application, vaguely descended from Peter Rhines' old PC ATLAST (http: / / podaac.jpl.nasa.gov:2031/ dataset_docs / ATLA ST.html) which sprang from the Living Ocean Atlas of Stommel.Reading the literature on OceanAtlas certainly convinces me that it might be a terrific mousetrap, but alas I am a PC-head, son of a PC-head, and will never know.Although, as I said, you never really see what's going on "inside" ODV's obviously very robust data model, the capabilities for producing graphical analyses are vast.The "data collection" (the author's term to