Reference tables and NVS vocabulary server

The Argo netcdf format is strict and based on a collection of variables fully documented and conventioned. All reference tables can be found in the Argo user manual.

However, a machine-to-machine access to these tables is often required. This is possible thanks to the work of the Argo Vocabulary Task Team (AVTT) that is a team of people responsible for the NVS collections under the Argo Data Management Team governance.

Note

The GitHub organization hosting the AVTT is the ‘NERC Vocabulary Server (NVS)’, aka ‘nvs-vocabs’. This holds a list of NVS collection-specific GitHub repositories. Each Argo GitHub repository is called after its corresponding collection ID (e.g. R01, RR2, R03 etc.). The current list is given here.

The management of issues related to vocabularies managed by the Argo Data Management Team is done on this repository.

argopy provides the utility class ArgoNVSReferenceTables to easily fetch and get access to all Argo reference tables. If you already know the name of the reference table you want to retrieve, you can simply get it like this:

In [1]: from argopy import ArgoNVSReferenceTables
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ImportError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[1], line 1
----> 1 from argopy import ArgoNVSReferenceTables

ImportError: cannot import name 'ArgoNVSReferenceTables' from 'argopy' (/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/argopy/checkouts/latest/argopy/__init__.py)

In [2]: NVS = ArgoNVSReferenceTables()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[2], line 1
----> 1 NVS = ArgoNVSReferenceTables()

NameError: name 'ArgoNVSReferenceTables' is not defined

In [3]: NVS.tbl('R01')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[3], line 1
----> 1 NVS.tbl('R01')

NameError: name 'NVS' is not defined

The reference table is returned as a pandas.DataFrame. If you want the exact name of this table:

In [4]: NVS.tbl_name('R01')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[4], line 1
----> 1 NVS.tbl_name('R01')

NameError: name 'NVS' is not defined

If you don’t know the reference table ID, you can search for a word in tables title and/or description with the search method:

In [5]: id_list = NVS.search('sensor')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[5], line 1
----> 1 id_list = NVS.search('sensor')

NameError: name 'NVS' is not defined

This will return the list of reference table ids matching your search. It can then be used to retrieve table information:

In [6]: [NVS.tbl_name(id) for id in id_list]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[6], line 1
----> 1 [NVS.tbl_name(id) for id in id_list]

NameError: name 'id_list' is not defined

The full list of all available tables is given by the ArgoNVSReferenceTables.all_tbl_name() property. It will return a dictionary with table IDs as key and table name, definition and NVS link as values. Use the ArgoNVSReferenceTables.all_tbl() property to retrieve all tables.

In [7]: NVS.all_tbl_name
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[7], line 1
----> 1 NVS.all_tbl_name

NameError: name 'NVS' is not defined