Advanced examples

Some of the examples presented here require Python packages that are not available by default on Google Colab. You can create a conda environment on your computer with all the packages used in these examples using the conda environment file environment.yml found on our website.

Reading and visualizing cast data from SeaBird CTD .cnv data files

SeaBird CTD instruments are widely used in Oceanography. SeaBird CTD software also integrate data from other sensors. Reading SeaBird CTD .cnv data files is therefore a common task. The files are text based and one could write code from scratch to read and parse them, but then lots of people would be reinventing the wheel, imperfectly.

In the read-aplsurp-ctd-casts-with-ctd-package.ipynb notebook, we use the ctd open-source package to read SeaBird CTD files and the folium open-source package to create interactive maps of cast locations using information read from the cast files.

To see more of the capabilities of the ctd package, check out the demonstration notebook found on the ctd website.

Note

It’s not uncommon for different people or groups to create open-source packages with overlapping capabilities. There is at least one other package that reads SeaBird cnv files: the seabird package, https://seabird.readthedocs.io. Often in these cases, each package may have some features that the other one doesn’t.