Quick Guide: Making data plots available
Introduction
As data is produced by instrumentation it is sometimes desirable to provide access to visualisations of the data - whether early 'quick looks' or as a supporting set of plots to accompany the data in the long-term archive. The reasons for making such plots available may include: tracking instrument performance and data workflow monitoring; near real time (NRT) views of the data to aid project/fieldwork use, be that as a standard part of service provision or a dedicated project feed; or to aid discovering suitable data for specific needs from the archive.
In all cases, preparing the plots in a suitable manner is key for correct interpretation and accessibiliy. See the accompanying Quick Guide: Creating Plots For Science and Accessibility for guidance on these aspects.
Quick-look access
The NCAS IT team have supported a range of options over the years, building up experience of the available options. This guide covers a few of these options, alongside comments on their strengths and weaknesses to help instrument operators needing to provide access to such quick looks.
| Data Type | Display tool | Data Type Required | Service location | Next Steps | Comments | Examples |
| Time series (1D) data | Grafana | Number values (e.g. CSV file) | Instrument folder on the NCAS Obs GWS* | Talk to NCAS IT | Good for monitoring simple time feeds from sites. | Weyborne Atmospheric Observatory |
| Spatial and Space-Time plots | Bespoke Catalogue page | Plot files in PNG/JPEG format | Public HTML folder on NCAS GWS or Object Store | Talk to NCAS IT | Plots can be made available in Grafana too, but there are issues around timeliness | FORCE WRF model plots calendar |
| Data pipeline/process monitoring | Grafana | Number values (e.g. CSV file) | Talk to NCAS IT | Useful for identifying data processing chains and transfers to CEDA archive | NCAS Obs GWS to CEDA upload monitor |
*For raw/unprocessed data, this might be able to be taken straight from the instrument (for NRT) - speak to ncas-it if required
What about providing access via the long-term archive?
Sometimes its useful to make data plots available via a long-term archive such as CEDA.
Making such plots availability to accompany NCAS datasets, for example, stored by CEDA can increase data discovery and usage since they can allow potential users to quickly and easily identify:
- whether the underlying dataset is generally suitable for their requirements
- which of the underlying data files are specifically suitable for their requirements (e.g. if they are looking for periods that show evidence of a particular phenomenon)
Note that:
- The plots are made available as an addition to the dataset rather than being formally part of it
- The plots are openly-accessible, meaning that anyone (i.e. not only people with a CEDA account) can access them
The long-term archive should be used for content that is static and not needing to be changed once deposited. At such, it may not be the ideal place for quick sharing of data, but may be suitable to aid data discovery/data exploring of the long-term archive by providing graphical views of that archived material. Care is needed about the mapping between the such data plots and the data files themselves, especially with regards to differences in versioning between plot files and the associated data files.