Data processing#
We aim for Echopype to provide “building blocks” that can be strung together to construct processing pipelines for water column sonar data to bring raw instrument-generated files to analysis-ready data products that can be easily leveraged by further downstream processing routines.
To this end, the Echopype workflow focuses first on standardizing instrument-generated data to a netCDF data model (the EchoData object), and build computational routines based on the standardized data. Specifically, beyond the EchoData objects, the calibrated Sv and outputs of all subsequent data processing functions are generic xarray Datasets. This allows new processing functions be easily added without needing to understand specialized objects, other than functions needing access of data stored only in the raw-converted EchoData objects.
See the Echopype paper for more details on the design philosophy.
In this section:
Data processing functionalities discusses current processing functions and their usage
Additional information for processed data discusses some aspects of processed data that may require additional explanation