Most datasets are missing depth/altitude!

[rsignell-usgs]

I was talking with @johnwilkin about how he might create his assimilation file for ROMS programatically using ERDDAP advanced search and allDatasets queries.

Basically what we want to generate is a CSV file where the column headers are:

time, longitude,  latitude, depth,  variable_id,  value

where variable_id includes salinity and temperature.

When we tried this, however, we found out that most datasets have no depth or altitude information!

Look at the maxAltitude for data in the last week: https://erddap-uncabled.oceanobservatories.org/uncabled/erddap/tabledap/allDatasets.htmlTable?datasetID%2CminLongitude%2CminLatitude%2CminAltitude%2CmaxAltitude%2CmaxTime&maxTime%3E=now-7days

The only datasets that have altitude are ones that have a variable called altitude that is actually the gps altitude rather than the nominal altitude that would be useful to users: https://erddap-uncabled.oceanobservatories.org/uncabled/erddap/tabledap/CE01ISSM-RID16-00-DCLENG000-cg_dcl_eng_dcl_gps-telemetered-deployment0008-tabledap.graph?time%2Caltitude%2Cgps_num_satellites&time%3E=2017-12-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&time%3C=2017-12-08T00%3A00%3A00Z&.draw=markers&.marker=5%7C5&.color=0x000000&.colorBar=%7C%7C%7C5%7C12%7C&.bgColor=0xffccccff

I would argue that:

• altitude (or depth) should be added to all datasets
• the variables currently called altitude should be renamed gps_altitude

[rsignell-usgs]

@kerfoot reported back offline:

I think this is a UFrame NetCDF creation issue... I will follow up with the CI group Monday and let you know

[rsignell-usgs]

Further conversations with @kerfoot confirm this is an issue that needs to be handled on the uframe side with processors, as they need to derive depth variables for many of these datasets.