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.

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