The CTD Oceanographic Rendering and Analysis Laboratory (CORAL)

Abstract

The CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth) oceanographic Rendering and Analysis Laboratory (CORAL) is a general purpose X Windows/OSF Motif-based computatioal environment for the archiving, browsing, analysis and display of geophysical data. CORAL provides the user with several noteworthy feature: 1) a consistent, robust and intuitive graphical user interface to a geophysical database(s) and related analysis and display functions that are user extensible; 2) a high-level database interface for acquiring any desired subset(s) of data from multiple databases; 3) a simplified method for manipulating subsets of data once retrieved from one or more databases; and 4) analysis functions organized as extensible libraries for use in a wide variety of geophysical problems. Moreover, the library structure allows other analysis capabilities (e.g., Statistical Sciences? S-PLUS) to be added easily to CORAL. CORAL also provides graphical and rendering capabilities and support for several map projections commonly used in earth sciences. Because CORAL functions can be designed to support either regularly or irregularly gridded data, CORAL can be used for calibrating satellite data with ground-truth data, as a compute engine for joint remote sensing-in situ data analysis, and for assembling and analyzing specific subsets of data from large archived in situ databases. Because the X Windows Applications Programmer Interface was used in its design, CORAL can be run on a variety of hardware platforms. Moreover, because CORAL's distributed database management system (Empress) supports heterogeneous networks, CORAL provides a way for several scientists working on a given project to share their data and analyzed results (the Internet).