MBARI OASIS3 Mooring Guide

Data Collection Overview

Introduction

Data collection from OASIS based moorings varies depending on the type of deployment: Local, Drifters and Equatorial Pacific (Eqpac).

Data Collection From Local Moorings

Data is collected and processed each hour from the local moorings via packet radio. The data collection and processing scripts consist of a number of shell scripts, C programs, Sed and Awk scripts. The location of these files is described in the file reference appendix. A mobile version of this software, oasisnt, has been made to run on a Windows NT laptop or PC for off line pre-deployment testing as well as for drifter deployments.

A crontab file containing download tasks is registered with cron. Each hour, cron invokes the master download script, getmoor (download). getmoor (download) calls shell scripts get<x>, which in turn use compiled programs getoasis and extract to connect to the mooring, download and decode the data from the mooring. get<x> generates a log file, dlinfo.log, containing the download start time, stop time, file size, and exit code. download and extract both modify oasis.rcd, a file used to keep track of missing data records.

Once per day, cron invokes the shell scripts process and tarraw. process concatenates the day's data onto a cumulative file kept for each instrument in /oasis/<mooring>/data/<instrument>. tarraw archives the day's raw data files, adding them into a tar file, /oasis/raw/tar/<mooring.tar. The raw data is swept into a temporary holding directory (/oasis/raw/erase) and a text listing of tar archive is created (/oasis/raw/tar/<mooring>.dir).

For the equatorial Pacific (EQPAC) moorings, data is received daily via email from System ARGOS. Its arrival triggers a script (epmail) specified in the .forward file for user eqpac on Tsunami. The raw data contained in the email is filtered by PTT number; whenever the PTT number is changed in the field, it is necessary to modify the script \\Tsunami\oasis\eqpac\bin\process. The processing for EQPAC data is similar to that for local moorings; data is organized only by instrument (not by day) for EQPAC data, however. The program argfilter is used to filter for the PTT numbers of the currently deployed cans (the email contains data from potentially many PTTs). argos, the analog of the decode program, is used to generate some of the data output for EQPAC moorings.