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Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Databases Galore - 13

Fig. 1 Dredd Blog "zones" (click to enlarge)
I am working on a database I downloaded from NASA AMD containing ARGO and other types of detection / recording systems for studying the Southern Ocean down usefully deep.

These are records about many aspects of ocean water, from the surface to way down deep (temperature, chemical and organic content, pressure, etc.).

One of the seven tables has ~3 million rows, 28 columns of data (initial conversion of .csv to SQL is slow plodding).
Fig. 2 Zone Quadrants and Subquadrants

The target use is the real story that the thermal expansion, bathtub model commentariat should be reporting.

Anyway, I am coming up for air soon to post all about it in this space.

UPDATE (Sat. June 4): The "stations" table ("stations" are floats, buoys, submersibles, etc.) that measure various  aspects of ocean water at various depths.

These are the columns in the "stations" table:
uid, stationindex, cruise, no, stationno, startlatitude, startlongitude, startday, startmonth, startyear, starthour, startminute, starttz, depth, maxp, nbins, flags_checked, salinitycalibrated, salinityvalid, temperaturecalibrated, temperaturevalid, oxygencalibrated, oxygenvalid, fluorescencecalibrated, fluorescencevalid, nitratecalibrated, nitratevalid, silicatecalibrated, silicatevalid, phosphatecalibrated, phosphatevalid, nitritecalibrated, nitritevalid, slczone
Verification of the data is robust, as shown by those specialized columns in the 'stations' table:
flags_checked, salinitycalibrated, salinityvalid, temperaturecalibrated, temperaturevalid, oxygencalibrated, oxygenvalid, fluorescencecalibrated, fluorescencevalid, nitratecalibrated, nitratevalid, silicatecalibrated, silicatevalid, phosphatecalibrated, phosphatevalid, nitritecalibrated, nitritevalid
I added two columns, "uid" and "slczone" to the NASA stations table data.

Regular readers will recognize "slczone" as "squares" bounded by latitude and longitude (see Fig. 1), but more than that, as Fig. 2 shows, there are four Quadrants (smaller squares) within each zone, and finally there are four Subquadrants (even smaller squares) within each Quadrant.

The "startlatitude" and "startlongitude" fields in the stations table gave me the coordinates with which to accomplish that critical task.

The Southern Ocean is roughly Zone "AY" through Zone "A9" at the southern portion of the globe (12 Zones with 192 Subquadrants).

There are records of station data, described above, in 94 of the 192 subquadrants.

The data begins in year 1901 and currently stops in 2003 (I plan to supplement 2004-2015) with pure ARGO float data.

The bottom line is that I have enough data to argue the hypothesis (again) that in general only about 5.1% percent of SLR is caused by thermal expansion, land upheaval, and/or land subsidence.

UPDATE: I finished building the SQL database which has seven tables in it.

As it turns out, I had to back up to the zone level (excluding quadrants and subquadrants) to be able to generate fully populated graphs.

The first report is here.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.



5 comments:

  1. "In the past, rising air temperatures — which can cause an increase in melting on the surface of the ice sheet — have been the primary focus for glacier experts. But one factor that’s been gaining attention over the past few years is the influence of warm ocean water, which can melt the ice from underneath, thinning or even breaking the ice shelves and causing grounding lines to retreat backward."

    Thus, the "Southern Ocean" sub-surface temperatures affect grounding lines, which generally causes ice shelf problems

    A new study identifies another "worse that previously thought" Antarctic area (link).

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  2. Seems to be the pattern, doesn't it Randy - always "faster than expected" or "worse than previously thought" with regard to climate change. This would lead one to conclude that we have no idea how bad it is, how fast it's getting worse, or how little time we have left as a species.

    I hope WWIII doesn't break out before the end of 'the movie' - our privileged existence (falling apart).

    Tom

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  3. Thanks Dredd!
    I'm at 38.22 (s) and 145 (e)-right in A3.
    Here, some flooding images from Tas just south and also in A3. For some peculiar reason, if it's 'fresh' water accumulating, it's somehow 'natural' and OK. I can't imagine the 'response' when the source is from the surrounding sea.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-06/east-coast-storm-tasmania-sees-record-flooding-as-wild-weath/7482846

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  4. Mark,

    That video reminds me of Houston, TX. All those photos have likeness to what is happening there ... for quite a while now.

    Thanks for the reminder that we are all in this together ... we are all in "The Damaged Global Climate System."

    The data present quite a challenge.since it spans a century.

    Linking the old technologies over that time span is a reminder about the difficulties with studying the Southern Ocean.

    I'm about 2/3 done with the SQL relational database building, and current software for accessing it and then presenting graph making material.

    It may be that I will have to use quadrant level compositions rather than the smaller subquadrants.

    The data are spotty in some areas because of the difficulties older technology (older research vessels, harsh conditions, etc) faced.

    The bottom line is that we need to watch the Southern Ocean as it eats away at ice shelves and the coastal termini of ice sheet ice streams.

    Will know more later this week.

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