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Catalog of Copernicus variables under familiar names

Source: R/variables.R
copernicus_variables.Rd

Maps short names people actually use (SST, CHL, ...) onto the Copernicus Marine product, dataset, and variable code that supply them. Copernicus codes are terse and easy to misremember — thetao for temperature, mlotst for mixed layer depth, zos for sea surface height — and getting one wrong produces a failed download rather than an obvious mistake.

Usage

copernicus_variables()

Value

a named list, one entry per variable, each with variable, label, units, product_id, dataset_id, daily_dataset_id, and description

Details

Entries come from the global reanalyses: physical variables from GLOBAL_MULTIYEAR_PHY_001_030 (GLORYS12V1) and biogeochemical ones from GLOBAL_MULTIYEAR_BGC_001_029.

Monthly and daily

dataset_id is the monthly mean; daily_dataset_id is the daily one, which accessEnvDat() uses when given frequency = "daily". It is NA where no daily equivalent exists, and those gaps are not incidental:

  • PH — the daily biogeochemical reanalysis carries chl, no3, nppv, o2, po4 and si, but not ph. Only the monthly mean has it.

  • PP — Copernicus-GlobColour serves primary production as a monthly composite only.

  • DIATO, DINO — the daily ocean colour dataset carries total chlorophyll alone. The phytoplankton functional types are monthly.

CHL is the case worth reading twice. Daily ocean colour is not the monthly product at a finer step: it is l4-gapfree, the space-time interpolated field, because a single day of a single sensor is mostly cloud. The daily values are therefore already gap-filled by Copernicus, and running fill_satellite_gaps() over them fills nothing. accessEnvDat() says so when it makes the substitution.

Copernicus revises dataset identifiers periodically. If a fetch fails with an unknown-dataset error, check the current identifier on the Copernicus Marine Data Store and pass dataset_id explicitly.

See also

variable_dictionary() for a printable table

Examples

names(copernicus_variables())
#>  [1] "SST"       "SSS"       "BOTT"      "UO"        "VO"        "SSH"      
#>  [7] "MLD"       "SIC"       "CHL"       "PP"        "DIATO"     "DINO"     
#> [13] "NO3"       "PO4"       "O2"        "PH"        "CHL_MODEL" "NPP_MODEL"
copernicus_variables()$SST$variable
#> [1] "thetao"