ODV figures in R with bathymetry

Objective

Nearly four years after writing a blog post about recreating R figures in ODV I had someone reach out to me expressing interest in adding a bathymetry layer over the interpolated data. It’s always nice to know that these blog posts are being found useful for other researchers. And I have to admit I’m a bit surprised that the code still runs 4 years later. Especially considering that it uses the tidyverse which is notorious for breaking backwards compatibility. In order to demonstrate the overlaying of bathymetry data on a CTD transect we will need to use a different dataset than in the previous blog post. One may use any data one would like, but for this blog I went to this shiny app to extract some data from the coast of South Africa. Specifically I filtered for temperature data from November 1990 at all depths. We won’t go back over the theory for recreating the ODV figure in this blog post, so please revisit that for a recap as necessary. Below I will show two of the necessary steps to get interpolated CTD data before we begin on the bathymetry mask.

ODV figures in R

Objective

With more and more scientists moving to open source software (i.e. R or Python) to perform their numerical analyses the opportunities for collaboration increase and we may all benefit from this enhanced productivity. At the risk of sounding sycophantic, the future of scientific research truly is in multi-disciplinary work. What then could be inhibiting this slow march towards progress? We tend to like to stick to what is comfortable. Oceanographers in South Africa have been using MATLAB and ODV (Ocean Data View) since about the time that Jesus was lacing up his sandals for his first trip to Palestine. There has been much debate on the future of MATLAB in science, so I won’t get into that here, but I will say that the package oce contains much of the code that one would need for oceanographic work in R, and the package angstroms helps one to work with ROMS (Regional Ocean Modeling System) output. The software that has however largely gone under the radar in these software debates has been ODV. Probably because it is free (after registration) it’s fate has not been sealed by university departments looking to cut costs. The issue with ODV however is the same with all Microsoft products; the sin of having a “pointy clicky” user interface. One cannot perform truly reproducible research with a menu driven user interface. The steps must be written out in code. And so here I will lay out those necessary steps to create an interpolated CTD time series of temperature values that looks as close to the default output of ODV as possible.