Function: ticket

Definition

This function provides the list of tickets possibly affecting a float or a profile.

The NA-ARC system retrieves quality control information from the ftp greylist file, the LPO/Argo quality control database and the CLS/Altimetry last test results. Floats or profiles reported by one of these sources are flagged as having a “ticket” in the NA-ARC database.

Note that tickets are assigned to profiles, however the informations is provided for floats only at this point. This means that to specify the float for which ticket(s) are to be listed, an option specifying WMO(s) is mandatory. Two options are available:

  • "wmo"
  • - This option specify an exact WMO string.
        Ex: wmo=69003
    - More than one WMO can be provided using a coma separated list of WMOs.
        Ex: wmo=69003,456002,780002
  • "qwmo"
  • This option allows for partial WMO string pattern search in the database. For instance:
        qwmo=4740
    will retrieve the list of tickets affecting all floats with a WMO containing the pattern *4740*.
    The pattern must be at least 4 characters.

Default output format

The default (and only) output format for this function is JSON.

The JSON output is an object where floats WMO are keys and values are an array of issues. If no tickets are found 'null' is returned by the API.

Each issue is an object with the following keys:

  • "source"
  • Indicates where did the API get the information from.
    As of April 2012, it can be:
    - 'altimetry' (CLS/Coriolis Altimetring QC test),
    - 'argo' (Ifremer/LPO Argo issue database) or
    - 'ar_greylist' (ftp server greylist file).
  • "param"
  • Indicates which parameter is affected by the issue.
  • "comment"
  • Well, a comment on the issue.
  • "cycle_number"
  • Cycle numbers affected by the issue.
  • "solved"
  • Is the issue solved or not.
  • "file"
  • Provides an URL pointing to an illustration of the issue.
  • "start_date"
  • Indicates the starting date of the issue if no cycle numbers are provided.
  • "end_date"
  • Ending data of the issue.
  • "qc"
  • Indicates the quality control flag assigned to affected profiles.

Examples

Let's query the database for ticket for float WMO ID 6900474:

?get=ticket&wmo=6900474

The NA-ARC web API provides the following output:

The output indicates that the float with WMO ID 6900474 has a pressure drift affecting all cycles after #69. Here, the 'file' points to a figure showing the drift. The source 'altimetry' indicates that this issue was detected by CLS/Coriolis quality control using satellite altimeters.

With the option wmo, we indicated that users can query tickets for more than one float simply by appending WMOs in a coma separated list. Here is an exemple:

?get=ticket&wmo=6900474,6900083,690028

For this query, the NA-ARC web API provides the following output:

where we can see that: the list of tickets is ordered by increasing WMO numbers, one float may have more than one issue reported (see for float #6900083) and when no tickets are found for a WMO, nothing is return (there's no entry here for float #690028). Note that for float #6900083, tickets indicate that two pressure spikes are reported with a QC=1. These issues could be fixed by changing the QC flag, but it has not been done yet (parameter 'solved' is set to null).

Options

The two options for this function are 'wmo' and 'qwmo', which are not really options because one of those is mandatory to obtain a valid output from the API.

Other output format

There are no other output format supported at this time.