Detailed release notes are available on internal wiki (requires login)

Release notes summaries on this page:

• May 31, 2016
• May 9, 2016
• April 5, 2016
• March 15, 2016
• February 1, 2016
• January 5, 2016

2015 Release Notes

2014 Release Notes

2013 Release Notes

2012 Release Notes

2011 Release Notes

2010 Release Notes

31 May 2016

Data Preview

• The ZAP/ASL Echosounder daily plots now also show the elevation of the sun (derived).
• Added an animated display of CODAR (surface current) data for the following new sites:
  • Prince Rupert (Chatham Sound)
  • Georgina Point on Mayne Island (Strait of Georgia)
  • Point Atkinson in North Vancouver (Strait of Georgia)

Data Search and Data Products

• Added an animated display (GIF) data product for CODAR data for new sites (see Data Preview).
• Improved the process to search for data so that 1) data products may be viewed before the metadata is available, and 2) the status messages are more clear to show the progress of producing data products and metadata products. This is especially useful for large searches.
• Revised the calibration information on hydrophone spectrogram plots.
• When downloading a WAV file for hydrophone data, you will also get the calibration file if available. This is also true if you download using Search Hydrophone Data.

Support for New Instrument Types

• Bottom Instrument Package (BIP) for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Device ID 22880
• Bore Hole Temperature (BHT), device ID 23457
• SeaEye Falcon ROV navigation device, device ID 23851
• Hercules ROV CTD, device ID 23609
• SiiTech AIS (Automatic Identification System for ship tracking)
• Ferry radiometers (Satlantic Surface Acquisition System Solar Tracker), device ID 13340

Miscellaneous

• Added a new tool called Data Monitoring on the Admin menu (available only when logged in). This produces reports that indicate how many data samples were expected for each instrument on a given day, and how many were actually received and archived. The "Maximum Delta T" column shows the size of the largest data gap on that day.
• Modified the way data will be collected on the Queen of Oak Bay ferry, by running shorestation code on the ferry rather than sending the data via FTP to an existing shorestation.
• SeaTube was redesigned internally in order to support new features that will be added next month. At this time the only change you are likely to see is the display of time, latitude, longitude, and depth above the video. This will update on a regular basis, as opposed to the values shown in the Dive Log Entries below the video which only update when a dive log annotation is made. So this will explain why the values will often differ.

9 May 2016

Data Preview

• Added a Data Preview Management feature (on the Admin menu) to allow ONC staff to manage the Data Preview tree more easily. For example certain branches can be hidden if devices on that branch are not working at the moment and so would have no recent data plots to show. Or a particular time range tab can be disabled if it doesn't apply to a particular device.

Data Products (Data Search)

• Created wave data plots and MAT file data products for the Nortek AWAC at the FORCE observatory (Atlantic). This includes wave height, wave period, and wave direction. These are available in Data Preview and Data Search in Oceans 2.0 as well as on the Installations page in oceannetworks.ca.
• When creating data searches, removed the option to select only the sensors that are used for State of the Environment plots.
• Updated matlab to R2014a to enable Video QAQC. Bonus: all matlab processing should be about 30% faster.
• Added a prototype version of a Data Monitoring page for the Data team (Admin menu).
• Added more calibration information to spectrograms, added calibration text files to hydrophone WAV file searches

Miscellaneous

• Updated OpenDAP to use ERRDAP version 1.68
• Added support for adding new ERDDAP dataset definition
• Added support for controlling access to certain data in cases where there is a data ownership agreement. Note that this is not fully implemented yet, just the underlying framework.
• Added data acquisition for the SIMBA Ice Mass Buoy near Cambridge Bay
• Refactored the dive log entries to use the existing annotation system. This will make the data centralized and easier to manage.

oceannetworks.ca website

• Created a "Wiring the Abyss" section for the maintenance cruises that start May 10.
• As mentioned above, added wave plots for the Nortek AWAC device at the FORCE observatory (Atlantic).
• Added additional plots and camera videos to some of the community observatory pages.

5 April 2016

Data Preview

• Performed maintenance on the Data Preview tree to remove sensors inappropriate in this context, and to add new sensors for the Atlantic observatory.
• Refactored the way the Data Preview tree is pruned to show only certain devices and sensors. This is in preparation for a user interface that will allow internal users to manage the tree more easily in the future.

Miscellaneous

• SeaScript scheduled jobs now support multiple scripts to control multiple devices that use the same control schedule.
• Tested many devices before they were deployed to the new Smart Oceans sites (Campbell River, Prince Rupert, Kitamaat)
• All servers are now running OSGi model (Open Services Gateway initiative) software.
• Added a QAQC test runner job that runs QAQC on demand or on a schedule. This will allow us to run tests that use a large cache of data (Hampel filter tests, spike, gradient, etc.).
• Added infrastructure for video QAQC (available soon).
• Various improvements to scalar data products

oceannetworks.ca website

• Added community observatory web pages (or added sensors to existing pages) for the new Smart Oceans observatories at Campbell River, B.C. (Discovery Passage), Kitamaat Village, B.C. (Douglas Channel), and the first station of two (Ridley Island) at Prince Rupert, B.C. These can be found under the Learning / Ocean Sense page at http://www.oceannetworks.ca/learning/ocean-sense
• Modified the earthquake information block on the Home Page to now show the most recent local and global earthquakes that have happened in the past two weeks (used to be 24 hours).

15 March 2016

Data Preview

• It is now possible to annotate any branch of the Data Preview tree including search tree nodes, devices, and sensors. This is useful for posting status messages in the Data Preview display area. The usual data-related annotations will not appear.
  • When creating an annotation, select the search tree node, device, or sensor you want it to apply to. Note that the annotation will also appear on every branch below the one you annotate.
  • Select "Shared", and fill out the Data Preview comment section.
  • Select an appropriate date range. Note that the date range controls when the annotation appears. It relates to the date range of the data you are viewing. For example if the annotation applied for one day two weeks ago, it will not appear in the Day tab but will appear in the Month tab. The Summary tab shows all applicable annotations regardless of date range.
  • To cancel the annotation, either delete it (there is a link to it titled "More" where the annotation appears) or select a Date To in the past.
• Added data preview plots for the inshore profiler in Saanich Inlet.

Miscellaneous

• Sensor names can now be 50 characters long.
• Improved the code that parses the data from the Jason ROV navigation device.
• Improved the driver for the FORCE (Atlantic) RBR tide guage.
• Added a parser for the Hecules ROV navigation device.
• Started to convert the Oceans 2.0 software to the OSGi model (Open Services Gateway initiative). This will make the code more modular and will help to reduce the number of bugs in future.

oceannetworks.ca website

• The home page underwent a significant redesign. New features include:
  • a News Flash section at the top, highlighting the most recent important news story
  • Other blocks related to Science, News, etc.
  • A Systems Status section was added to display the current status of the three main features of Oceans 2.0.
    • These features are:
      • "Database" shows whether the database is online
      • "Data Acquisition" shows whether data is being acquired from instruments
      • "Oceans 2.0" shows whether the Oceans 2.0 website (dmas.uvic.ca) is online
    • The indicators have three states (pausing your cursor over the indicator will remind you of the following):
      • green circle indicates normal behaviour
      • orange triangle indicates slow behaviour
      • red "X" indicates that that feature is not working
    • Note that the indicators will only be updated when you load or refresh the page.
  • An Earthquake Data blocks shows if any significant earthquakes have been registered in the past 24 hours. The definition of a "significant earthquake" is the same definition that is used by the Earthquake Data Dashboard page; earthquakes that are close to southern British Columbia can have a lower magnitude to be considered "significant" compared to remote earthquakes. Clicking on the chevron (">") or the map takes you to the Earthquake Data Dashboard. 
  • There is an Events section that shows the events that are on today, and events that are coming up. Events include Alerts, Conferences, Expeditions, Meetings and Workshops, and Public Events. 

INCISE website

• created a website to promote the INCISE International Submarine Canyon Symposium to be held in Victoria, Canada this July. This was released some time ago but this month we added a page to submit abstracts and have them approved. See http://incise2016.oceannetworks.ca/ 

1 February 2016

Data Search and Data Products

• A new "Sort by" option has been added, called "Variables by Location". Some refer to this as a "primary sensor" search and is the same feature that was added to Plotting Utility a couple of months ago. You first select a location, then a variable (for example an ocean property such as Salinity). If there is more than one sensor at that location that can measure the same property, the sensor defined as the "primary sensor" will be used. This is the sensor that is the most accurate of the sensors available. It is possible that the primary sensor can change over the time range of a data product; the primary sensors used and their corresponding date ranges are listed in the metadata report as well as in the header of the data product or as colours in plots.
  
• Search results will now remain in the search cart ("Step 3") for 14 days, after which they will automatically be removed from the cart. This matches the changes to the FTP storage made in the January 5 release.
• Imagenex 881a products now make use of an orientation attribute so that the seabed will be located at the bottom of the plots or manufacturer's software. Formats affected: .81a/MAT/TXT files, PNG/GIF/AVI plots.
• The ADCP (both RDI and Nortek) Daily Current Plot (PNG) now has options for the limits to be plotted; users can choose from a set of fixed limits or automatic. This allows plots to be compared when the automatic limit may vary: large time ranges over varying conditions or different devices. The automatic limit is based on the 5% and 95% percentile rounded outwards to the nearest fixed limit value.
• Completed a new CSV engine to support variables by location search, which is also used for location and instrument searches (unifies the code base). Benefits include speed, future-proofing, among other various improvements.
• Removed the deployment legend and markers in time series scalar plots to support variables by location search.

Data Preview

• You can now open the Data Preview tree to any location or device or sensor, select the URL, and give that to someone else (for example) who can then automatically open Data Preview at this same location, including which tab you have selected (Summary, Day, or Month).
• Removed devices from the tree that are not currently deployed and added devices that are deployed but that had been missing from the tree.

Miscellaneous

• Improved the way Device IDs are used during dive logging.

oceannetworks.ca website

• Improved the earthquake data dashboard (www.oceannetworks.ca/data-tools/earthquake-data-dashboard) so that you can now select any earthquake from the table, which will display as usual. You can then use the URL to pull up this same earthquake at a later date.

5 January 2016

Data Preview

• Inactive locations are no longer visible on the Data Preview tree.

Data Search and Data Products

• Data product search results will now be available for 14 days rather than 7 days, but only in the FTP folder (see the More directory). Currently the results in the search cart are still only available for 7 days but this will increase to 14 days in a later release.
• Made some changes to allow Data Search and other features to work for users in China. It will not appear exactly the same as it does in other countries (for instance there will be no map) but it is functional.
• Improved the rendering of hydrophone spectrograms to reduce distortion.

• Improvements to hydrophone spectral probability density plots – limits, colours and scaling.

QA/QC
 

• "Station" QAQC tests now automatically also apply to all child nodes under those stations. This also applies to all new data for these child nodes even if the station test was created before this new feature was added.
• The new "region" QAQC test results now have priority over "station" test results.

Miscellaneous

• Improvements to file postprocessing infrastructure to reduce data processing backlogs and maintain better near live data, particularly for hydrophone spectrograms.

oceannetworks.ca Website

• Added support code for a new feature to display the current status of Oceans 2.0. However this will not be visible until the home page redesign is complete.