Global Ocean Data Viewer

The Global Ocean Data Viewer (GLODV) displays several kinds of ocean data. It creates and displays images from the World Ocean Atlas 1998 Climatological data. Climatological data is averaged over many years. The Annual data is a simple average of all data between 1900 and 1998. There are also seaonal and monthly averages available. These are averages over the same season (or month) for the 1900 to 1998 years.

Figure 1 shows the EarthEd screen where you access this module.

Figure 1: This is the "Office" screen where you can access the GLODV module.

3D viewer

Figure 2. After you click the "Start Viewer" button, you get to this 3-D data display screen. The "Using the data viewer" text field has information on how to use the viewer. Some of the operations you can do are:

  1. Rotate the map to see how the cross section and map views correlate.
  2. Change the data that is plotted on the map (Map Data button)
  3. Change the depth section that is plotted using the "Depth groups" menu (the pulsing red arrow on the map shows which section is active)
  4. Change the parameter that is plotted in the depth section (Use the "Depth data type" button)
  5. Animate the map data when seasonal or monthly data have been created.
  6. Create new depth section data groups
  7. Delete depth section data groups
  8. Save the plot image to your graphics library

Note that when you move the cursor over the map or depth section, the "Data Under the Cursor" fields indicate that lat/lon and depth values under the cursor. If you move the mouse over the map, then the colorbar that tells you what color corresponds to what data value, the value is displayed.

Slice Viewer

You can also explore the data using the "Slice Viewer." This option allows quick data exploration. \

Figure 3. The slice viewer allows for quick data exploration. You can also capture the image and upload it to your online graphics library. To show a slice, select the map data type from the "Data" menu. You can select a season from the "Date" menu. The Colorbar setting that the screen shows when you enter it, is the one that is used in the 3D plots. Notice that when you move the mouse over a data plot, the actual value is displayed in the "Value" field.

Lamont Viewer

The Lamont viewer provides another set of options for accessing data. It sends a request to the Lamont site: http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/ for an image, which is returned and displayed. Unfortunately, the Macromedia Director program that GLODV is authored in has some limitations, so some kinds of data cannot be accessed here. For example wind vector data must be accessed from the oceanography course "Earth Data" web page. Kinds of data that can be displayed currently are:

  1. World Ocean Atlas 1994. Depth line profile sections can be plotted here too.
  2. Sea surface temperatures at monthly intervals (1960-2004)
  3. Sea surface temperature anomalies at monthly intervals (1960-2004)
  4. Precipitation in monthly averages (1979-2002)

Animations are not implemented.

Figure 4. Screen shot of a Lamont Viewer profile.

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