Oceanographic Analysis with R (eBook)

Dan E. Kelley is a Professor in the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University, which is one of Canada's oldest universities and a national center for research in the fields of ocean science, policy, and law. He teaches at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and has been nominated twice for teaching awards. His research focuses on physical oceanography, in particular the parameterization of small-scale mixing and exchanges associated with convection, double diffusion, internal waves, and frontal instabilities. He also collaborates widely on topics ranging from under-ice algal blooms to the mechanics of whale-ship collisions. A former executive member of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, a long-serving Graduate Coordinator, a university Senator, and the recipient of both the Rosemary Gill Award for outstanding service to students and an NSERC University Research Fellowship, Kelley has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals.

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This book presents the R software environment as a key tool for oceanographic computations and provides a rationale for using R over the more widely-used tools of the field such as MATLAB. Kelley provides a general introduction to R before introducing the 'oce' package. This package greatly simplifies oceanographic analysis by handling the details of discipline-specific file formats, calculations, and plots. Designed for real-world application and developed with open-source protocols, oce supports a broad range of practical work. Generic functions take care of general operations such as subsetting and plotting data, while specialized functions address more specific tasks such as tidal decomposition, hydrographic analysis, and ADCP coordinate transformation. In addition, the package makes it easy to document work, because its functions automatically update processing logs stored within its data objects. Kelley teaches key R functions using classic examples from thehistory of oceanography, specifically the work of Alfred Redfield, Gordon Riley, J. Tuzo Wilson, and Walter Munk. Acknowledging the pervasive popularity of MATLAB, the book provides advice to users who would like to switch to R. Including a suite of real-life applications and over 100 exercises and solutions, the treatment is ideal for oceanographers, technicians, and students who want to add R to their list of tools for oceanographic analysis.