NOAA CoastWatch Short Course at Ocean Optics 2022
October 2nd, 2022, 8:30am-12:30pm
The NOAA CoastWatch/OceanWatch/PolarWatch program (aka CoastWatch) provides free and open access to ocean satellite products through a variety of platforms.
CoastWatch will be leading a hands-on workshop on tools used to work with ocean satellite data. The session will familiarize participants with visualizing data layers using the CoastWatch Data Portal, accessing, subsetting and downloading data from ERDDAP and working with netCDF-formatted data using the CoastWatch utilities. Examples will focus on L2, L3 and L4 ocean satellite data distributed by CoastWatch. It will be a mix of demos and in-class tutorials.
The NOAA CoastWatch Data Portal map viewer serves as the front door to these data services by providing visualization, links to product information, and access to datasets in part or whole. At a basic level, the map viewer displays data products such as sea surface temperature, chlorophyll, sea level anomaly, and sea surface winds. Users can select palettes, data scaling ranges and download the actual data viewed through the map viewer. The map viewer provides simplified access to our backend services.
The CoastWatch Utilities are used on Linux, Mac, and Windows for viewing and manipulating CoastWatch HDF and NetCDF datasets once downloaded from a data server. The CoastWatch Data Analysis Tool (CDAT) acts as the user interface viewing program to (i) display datasets using color palettes, (ii) overlay coast lines, grid lines, and GIS shape files, (iii) perform interactive data analysis, and (iv) export to other formats such as PNG, JPEG, and GeoTIFF. The CoastWatch Utilities package also includes command line tools for batch scripting, capable of registering data to map projections, sampling, statistics, generic math operations, compositing, conversion, and metadata manipulation.
Workshop Objectives:
- Get familiar with the NOAA CoastWatch program as a data provider
- Use the Data Portal to visualize and download swath data or L3 layers
- Use ERDDAP to visualize and download data
- Use the CW Utilities to register downloaded data to a map projection and view the result.
Pre-course Downloads:
- Download and install CoastWatch Utilities
- https://coastwatch.noaa.gov/cw/user-resources/coastwatch-utilities.html#downloads Links to an external site.
- Download and extract (un zip) sample data files (330MB)
- https://coastwatch.noaa.gov/cw_html/MTS/SampleData.zip Links to an external site.
Workshop Agenda:
4 hours - 0830-1230
AgendaResource
| Timing | ||
| 08:00-08:30 | Introduction / Computer prep / Downloads | 00 Pre-Class Actions |
| 08:30-09:00 | Introduction to NOAA CoastWatch | 01 Course Intro |
| 09:00-09:15 | Introduction to CoastWatch Utilities | 02a CoastWatch Utils |
| 09:15- | Ex 1: Render, Annotate and Export Image [CDAT] | Demo / Canvas |
| Ex 2a: Opening a Level-1, RGB composite [CDAT] | Demo / Canvas | |
| Ex 2b: Examining Flags [CDAT] | Demo / Canvas | |
| Break / Work on Exercises | ||
| Ex 2c: U-V Component Vectors [CDAT, CW Utils] | Demo / Canvas | |
| Ex 3: Projections and Composites [CW Utils] | Demo / Canvas | |
| - 10:00 | Ex 4: Working with Non-CoastWatch Data. [NCML] | Demo / Canvas |
| 10:00-10:30 | Work on Exercises / Break | |
| 10:30 - 11:00 | Data Portal | Demo [Canvas] |
| 11:00-12:00 | ERDDAP | Lecture + Demo [Canvas] |
| 12:00-12:30 | ERDDAP Exercises | Canvas |
Additional CoastWatch Satellite Training Course Reference: April 2022 CoastWatch Course