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Animation showing a mixture of enivronmental variables for the northeast U.S. shelf region. The white nearshore gaps in some figures represent artifacts of coastal coverage by lower resolution data products.
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Like COPEPODITE, the compilation of data sources, analytical methods, and graphical visualizations featured in NAUPLIUS came about while working with NMFS scientists and members of the ICES and SCOR plankton research groups.
It was created while solving the needs of these working groups, used to address real questions and pursuits in the plankton and ecosystems community.
An example application of NAUPLIUS:
There is a wealth of data available for a person studying ecosystem status and trends in the northeast U.S. continental shelf region.
One only needs to go to the various NOAA, NASA, IOOS, NODC, NMFS, NCDC, and NGDC sites, download hundreds of data files (hundreds of gigabytes worth) and spend the next month programming.
After writing conversion tools and programs to process the multitude of data formats, the next step is tackling the different spatial grid sizes (from "9 km" to "1 degree") and reference systems (are the values gridded by numeric indices or latitude/longitudes, and do the locations represent the center or the top-left-corner of each grid cell).
After all that hard work, you may have a few surprises.
For example, the World Ocean Database nutrient fields are 1x1 degree (~100 x 100 km) while the satellite chlorophyll data are a tiny fraction of that size, and each covers the near-shore areas of your study area in completely different ways.
All of this assumes you have a software package capable of mapping and contouring these types of data (Excel can't do it).
Of course the other solution is to use NAUPLIUS ... with a collection of pre-made regional extractions and the ability to request custom extractions to fit your needs.
Go to NAUPLIUS now ...
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