Download ODV4 - User's Guide - Ocean Data View

ODV User’s Guide
line contains metadata and data for one sample. All samples of a given station must be
in consecutive order but need not be sorted. Missing values may be indicated by an
empty field, the value -1.e10, or by a text indicator, such as na (not available) or NaN
(not a number). If special numeric values, such as -9 or -9999, are used as missing value
indicators in the file, the special values must be specified in an attribute line of the form
//<MissingValueIndicators>-9 -9999</MissingValueIndicators> near the top of the file
before any data line.
Station labels are limited to the length of the Station meta-variables (default: 20 characters). The use of numbers for station labels will enable enhanced internal sorting and
selection functionality and is recommended.
Station Type is a single character string. You should use B for stations with less than
about 250 samples (e.g., bottle data) and C for stations with more than about 250 samples (e.g., CTD, XBT, etc.). Specifying * for Type lets ODV make the choice. If Bot. Depth
values are not available, you should leave this field empty.
The station metadata must be provided on the first line of a given station. The metadata
fields on the remaining lines of the station may remain empty to reduce file size (compact spreadsheet format). An ODV generic spreadsheet file usually stores the data of
many stations from many cruises. The metadata and data of the first sample of the next
station follow immediately after the last sample of the previous station. There are no
separator lines between stations.
Numeric values may have periods ‘.’ or commas ‘,’ to indicate decimals (e.g., 2,57 or 2.57
are both valid entries). If entries are enclosed in double quotes “, these are automatically removed before processing.
Data variables of type TEXT use a one byte per character encoding. ODV collections remain platform and country independent if the text values are strictly confined to the
ASCII character set (codes 0-126). Usage of non-ASCII characters will work fine on the
same platform and within the same locale (country), however, non-ASCII characters
likely display incorrectly on different platforms or in different countries. ASCII-only text
should always be used for the sake of platform independence of data collections.
The maximum number of bytes that can be stored per value of a text data variable (byte
length) is fixed and must be specified at collection creation time. The actual requested
byte length must include one extra byte for text termination. If, for instance, a text variable must be able to store 40 characters of text, the requested byte length must be 41.
The byte-length of a text variable cannot be smaller than 2 and is otherwise arbitrary.
Choosing large byte-lengths, such as 5001, accommodates long texts, but also leads to
large collection files, because all individual text values occupy the specified number of
bytes. If a given text value represents a DOI or a URL of a website, ODV will allow clicking on the value and will open the DOI or URL in a web browser. Using URLs or DOIs
should be considered as alternative to using large amounts of text directly.
16.4 Supported Date and Time Formats in ODV Spreadsheet Files
ODV supports the single column ISO 8601 date/time format. This is the recommended
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