Slocum-AD2CP

Slocum-AD2CP is a package designed to process Nortek AD2CP data from Teledyne Webb Research Slocum gliders. The package is designed to walk through the steps to process AD2CP data in several Jupyter notebooks.

Please cite this package using this DOI. The intention for publishing this code on GitHub is twofold: 1) to make glider based acoustic current profiler data easier to work with and 2) to improve upon the processing workflow and make it more transparent. For these reasons, I encourage comments, questions, concerns, and for users of this code to report any potential bugs. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at jgradone@marine.rutgers.edu.

Installation

slocum_ad2cp can be install via:
pip install slocum_ad2cp

Processing Raw AD2CP Data

This package is built under the assumption that users are processing their AD2CP data to NetCDFs using the Nortek MIDAS software.

Changelog

Unreleased, 2026-09-16

• Added a glider.py module with an interchangeable glider data backend: alongside the existing get_erddap_dataset path, load_glider_dbd/load_glider(source="dbd") reads raw Slocum dbd/ebd files (and their LZ4-compressed dcd/ecd counterparts, needs dbdreader>=0.6) directly, useful before a deployment is published to ERDDAP. Both backends return the same segment-table schema.
• Added correct_ad2cp_mounting / detect_roll_offset to make_dataset.py. Some Slocum payload-bay AD2CP mounts report roll 180 degrees from the glider's own frame; left uncorrected, cell_vert returns negative cell depths and binmap_adcp silently drops every bin. Opt-in, not called by the existing pipeline.
• Fixed a bug in beam2enu (make_dataset.py): the function computed a pitch-dependent 3-of-4-beam selection (dropping the aft beam on downcasts, the forward beam on upcasts, per the glider's actual attitude) and then unconditionally discarded that choice, always applying the beam 2/3/4 transform regardless of pitch. beam2enu now takes honour_pitch_selection (default True, the corrected behaviour).