Last June we (credits below) ran a SeaBird CTD workshop for the Israeli oeanographic community. While preparing for this workshop we prepared a series of tutorials in the form of blog posts with screencasts combined in them. Looking at the final product we believe those tutorials might save time for anyone beginnig to work with SeaBird products so we share them here.
This post (link) will teach you the basics, how to connect, test and sample using SeaBird CTD.
When you will try sampling you will probably have some problems, and this post (link) will help troublshoot and solve problems.
Sometimes, you will have to reconfigure your CTD, this post (link) will show you how to use the software that does that (Sea-Term)
When sampling and troublshooting you will have to configure your software, this post (link) will show you the different SeaBird file types and how to configure using each of these files.
Once you left all of the operating and sampling behind, you will want to export the data to do oceanography, this post (link) will help in viewing your CTD data using ocean data view (ODV).
In this post I will give a tutorial explaining how to prepare SeaBird CTD data for analysis using ocean data view (ODV).
Both ODV and SeaBird CTD are near Oceanographic standard, but getting used to processing the CTD data for ODV takes some time. With the hope of saving you some of this time I detail the procedure we usually take at the Israeli School of Marine Sciences.
Step one:
Convert the hex file downloaded frome the CTD or saved while sampling using SeaSave software to .cnv file. This step is conducted using the Data Conversion option in SeaBird data processing software (SBEDataProcessing).
Step two:
Align the CTD data. Since the CTD instrument is a combination of several sensors, each having a typical time lag the readings in one data scan does not really represent a single point in time for all water quantities. To compensate for this, CTD alignment is performed using the Align CTD option at the SBEDataProcessing.
Step three:
Average the CTD data by depth. Many times, having data values at fixed depth intervals (eg. 1m) is more convenient. To achieve that we use the Bin Average option in SBEDataProcessing.
Step four:
Import CNV files to ODV and validate the CTD measurements.
Step six:
Many times you sample discrete samples on the same xast you sampled using the CTD and you want to plot the data together. To do that you will have to:
Export the CTD data to spreadsheet
Open the spreadsheet externally (in excel or other spreadsheet software)
Add the discrete parameters and samples to the spreadsheet
open the spreadsheet in ODV.
Last step (seven):
Import the data to ODV and plot it. This is beyond the scope of this series.
Thanks to my teacher Gitai Yahel whotaughtme this process.
