Report output

All generated HTML files are fully self-contained: figures are embedded as base64 PNG images, JavaScript libraries are bundled inline, and no external requests are made at view time. The entire output directory can be copied to a USB drive or a vessel intranet server and used offline.

Directory layout

<output.dir>/
    index.html              front page
    casts.html              sortable table of all casts
    sections.html           section overview cards
    timeseries.html         cruise-wide time series index
    leaflet.html            interactive map
    sbe_sensors.html        sensor inventory across casts
    profiles_inventory.html netCDF variable + attribute inventory
    casts/
        cast_001.html
        cast_002.html
        ...
    sections/
        section_KTout.html
        section_FARDWO.html
        ...
    timeseries/
        timeseries_<name>.html
        ...

index.html

The front page shows:

An interactive Leaflet map (bundled offline) with the ship track and all cast positions. Clicking a marker opens a pop-up with cast number and a link to the station page.
A summary table: total casts, date range, depth range.
Navigation links to the station index, section overview, and time series page.

casts.html

A sortable table listing every cast: cast number, date/time, latitude, longitude, and maximum pressure. Each row links to the corresponding station page.

sections.html

A card grid showing each named section from ctd_groupings.yaml. Each card shows the section name, description, cast count, and a thumbnail map. Clicking a card opens the section page.

Cast pages — `casts/cast_NNN.html`

One page per cast. Panels shown:

Panel	Description
CT profile	Conservative Temperature vs pressure (downcast and upcast).
T / S / σ₀ profile	Triple-axis profile of in-situ temperature, absolute salinity, and potential density anomaly.
T-S diagram	Temperature–salinity diagram coloured by O₂ saturation.
Auxiliary profiles	O₂ saturation, fluorescence, and turbidity vs pressure.
Stability panels	Buoyancy frequency N² and Turner angle vs pressure.
Cast map	Cruise track with the current cast highlighted.
LADCP profiles	Eastward and northward velocity vs pressure (shown when LADCP data are present).

Processing provenance

An appendix on each cast page reports what the Sea-Bird deck unit and Sea-Bird Data Processing did to the cast before ctdcast read it. ctdcast does not re-derive this; it recovers it from the raw instrument header, which every stage-1 file carries verbatim in its raw_metadata attribute and passes forward unchanged through stages 2 and 3. A cast with no Sea-Bird header (a LADCP cast, or a file converted without its header) has no provenance appendix.

The Corrections applied before ctdcast table lists each step in file order — the deck conductivity advance first, then each Data Processing module. Its columns are:

Step / Producer / Version — the module and who ran it.
Parameters — the salient settings, close to the header’s own wording.
Variables — the variable(s) the step modified, in ctdcast’s canonical names (the rename map is CNV_ALIASES in config/parameters.py); a name it does not cover keeps its header spelling.
Matches reference — a conformance check (see below), shown only for the SBE 9 / 11plus family, whose reference values are documented.

A step whose parameters differ per channel or per sensor — the deck advance (per conductivity cell), cell thermal mass (per cell), the low-pass filter (per time-constant group) — is split into one row each, so a check that passes on one channel and fails on another is not hidden behind a single verdict.

Conformance

The Matches reference column compares each step’s parameters against a documented typical value and shows one of three states, never conflated:

✓ — matches the documented value.
✗ — differs from it.
— — no reference exists to check against (an em dash, never a blank and never a cross).

A ✓ means “matches a documented typical value,” not “correct”; a ✗ means “differs,” not “wrong.” Every reference is configuration-dependent (a cell-thermal-mass α assumes a pump and duct; the deck advance assumes standard plumbing), so each cell names the source it compared against (e.g. SBE manual p.92), and the check is a match indicator, not a verdict. Some modules have no documented reference at all — Wild Edit, for instance, has only example dialog values, so it shows — with those examples offered as suggested starting points, not as a deviation.

A separate Conformance note collects the deviations as hedged, source-citing sentences, kept distinct from the structural Advisories note (which reports what the file is — e.g. already pressure-binned — rather than how its parameters compare). The panel keeps its focus on what was done to the data; per-sensor calibration state lives in the Sensors appendix, and the panel carries a one-line pointer to it.

Sensors appendix

A single table joins each science variable to the physical device that produced it, in one row: Variable · Role · Ch · Device · Model · Cal date · Slope · Offset. It is read from the per-cast sensor catalog (the SENSOR_* entries and each variable’s sensor link — see Data files (netCDF)), not re-parsed from the header. A device with no stored variable (pH, a transmissometer) still appears, with an empty Variable cell. For a frequency sensor (temperature, conductivity, pressure) a Slope away from 1 or Offset away from 0 is a datcnv drift/span correction already baked in; that row is tinted amber and the specific value bolded, so a correction is visible at a glance. A cast file that predates the catalog falls back to the header-parsed device inventory and calibration-state tables.

Section pages — `sections/section_NAME.html`

One page per named section. Panels shown:

Panel	Description
Conservative Temperature section	CT colour-filled on a distance × pressure grid.
Absolute Salinity section	SA colour-filled on a distance × pressure grid.
Potential density (σ₀) section	σ₀ colour-filled on a distance × pressure grid.
O₂ saturation section	O₂ colour-filled on a distance × pressure grid.
Section map	Cruise track with section casts highlighted.

All section plots use discrete colorbars with 20 levels. Bathymetry is shown as a filled grey polygon when a GEBCO file is available.

timeseries.html

Cruise-wide hovmöller diagrams:

Panel	Description
Temperature	CT vs time and pressure (downcasts only).
Salinity	SA vs time and pressure (downcasts only).
O₂ saturation	O₂ % vs time and pressure (downcasts only).

Time runs on the horizontal axis; pressure on the vertical axis (increasing downward).