CORA Documentation

CORA User Manual (December 2011) 3.60 MB

Data available in the CORA-GLOBAL-03 directory are ordered in 3 sub-directories: oa, raw et std. These sub-directories relate to the gridded fields (oa), to the raw data and to the data interpolated at standardized levels.

oa: objective analysis (gridded field and auxiliary data)

Under the oa directory the field sub-directory relates to the gridded fields and data relates to the auxiliary data of the analysis. These auxiliaries data correspond to meta-data like residuals, standard deviation on residuals, the a priori variance for each area and each level, errors on interpolations. Under each sub-directory data are sorted in a TEMP directory and in a PSAL directory.

File name: OA_DMOAGL01_YYYYMMDD_DAT/FLD_TEMP/PSAL.nc.bz2

where YYYYMMDD relates to the date of the objective analysis, DAT/FLD relates to either data or field directory, and TEMP/PSAL to either temperature or salinity. i.e.:

There is one file every 7 days. The date of the first file corresponds to the first Wednesday in the year. The date of the last file corresponds to the last Wednesday in the year.

raw: raw data

Files are sorted by year and by month.

File name: CO_DMOAGL01_YYYYMMDD_PR_TT.nc

where TT is the type of data: XB, PF, BA, TE, MO, OC and CT. This file includes raw datasets of the date YYYYMMDD.

std: data interpolated at standardized levels

Files are sorted by year and by month.

File name: ST_DMOAGL01_YYYYMMDD_PR_TT.nc

where TT is the type of data: XB, PF, BA,TE, MO, OC and CT. This file includes interpolated datasets of the date YYYYMMDD.

Which type of data?

• PF files : Argo profiles (RT&DM)
• XB files : high res. XBT profiles from research vessels and GTSPP
• CT files : CTD high res. profiles from research vessels + sea gliders data + marine mammals data received from MNHN
• OC files : high resolution CTD profiles from WOD09
• MO files : TAO, TRITON PIRATA data received in real time
• BA and TE files : low resolution profiles received from GTS

The Index files
An Index for the raw data of CORA3 is available (./RAW/Index). An index is organized as follow: there is one index file per month (e.g. index_cora3.2_01_1990.nc) containing only the main information about the profile (e.g. LONGITUDE, LATITUDE, JULD, PROBE_TYPE, PLATFORM_NUMBER, etc...), the name of the corresponding raw file (FILE_NAME) and the profile number in the raw file (NUM_PROF_IN_FILE). As the index files can be read very quickly, this allows the user to make his own data selection or to pick up a single profile in the raw database. The PROBE_TYPE variable was added to the index files (but not in the raw files) to facilitate the identification of a particular type of instrument. See the documentation for more details.