The CTD Oceanographic Rendering and Analysis Laboratory (CORAL)

Abstract The CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth) oceanographic Rendering and Analysis Laboratory (CORAL) is a general purpose X Windows/OSF Motif-based computatioal environment for the archiving, browsing, analysis and display of geophysical data. CORAL provides the user with several noteworthy feature: 1) a consistent, robust and intuitive graphical user interface to a geophysical database(s) and related analysis and display functions that are user extensible; 2) a high-level database interface for acquiring any desired subset(s) of data from multiple databases; 3) a simplified method for manipulating subsets of data once retrieved from one or more databases; and 4) analysis functions organized as extensible libraries for use in a wide variety of geophysical problems. Moreover, the library structure allows other analysis capabilities (e.g., Statistical Sciences’ S-PLUS) to be added easily to CORAL. CORAL also provides graphical and rendering capabilities and support for several map projections commonly ...