argoFloats: An R Package for Analyzing Argo Data

Abstract

An R package named argoFloats has been developed to facilitate identifying, downloading, caching, and analyzing oceanographic data collected by Argo profiling floats. The analysis phase benefits from close connections between argoFloats and the oce package, which is likely to be familiar to those who already use R for the analysis of oceanographic data of other kinds. This paper outlines how to use argoFloats to accomplish some everyday tasks that are particular to Argo data, ranging from downloading data and finding subsets to handling quality control and producing a variety of diagnostic plots. The benefits of the R environment are sketched in the examples, and also in some notes on the future of the argoFloats package.