Glider Playground

National Oceanography Centre

A fast, web-based explorer for ocean glider data. Load OG1 NetCDF files — or pull live deployments straight from BODC — and instantly plot, inspect, QC, and view them in 3D, all in your browser with no scripting required.

Live demo: glider-playground.co.uk (running on a Raspberry Pi — may be slow)

Glider Playground

Install & Run

pip install glider-playground
glider-playground

This opens the app in your browser. Press Ctrl+C in the terminal to stop it.

Virtual environment recommended. If you use one, activate it before running.

Install from source 
git clone https://github.com/Orlando-PB/glider-playground.git
cd glider-playground
pip install .

Loading Data

Files panel with live BODC deployments

Click the file button (top-left) to open the file panel. You can:

  • Browse live BODC deployments — pull published datasets directly from the British Oceanographic Data Centre
  • Add files — pick individual .nc files
  • Add folder — load an entire folder of .nc files at once

Your own files are processed once in the background. Once ready, click a file to load it.

File format: input files must be in OG1 format (or OG1-compatible) — the OceanGliders community NetCDF standard.

Live data is provided by the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC).

Views & Layout

Glider Playground is a flexible, multi-panel workspace — plots, the globe, and the 3D track are all panels you can arrange however you like.

  • Drag a panel by its header to reorder or swap it with another
  • Split any panel (the edge + buttons) to add another plot beside it
  • Resize by dragging the dividers; close a panel with its ✕
  • On a vertical / mobile screen the built-in presets automatically re-flow so plots sit on top and the maps share a row beneath

Presets

One click rebuilds the whole workspace:

Preset What you get
Map Globe + 3D view side by side, no plot
Dashboard Globe + 3D alongside a stack of thermal / chlorophyll / oxygen plots
Thermal, Salinity, Density, Chlorophyll, Oxygen, Backscatter, T-S Diagram, Phases A single plot of that variable, with the globe and 3D track

Presets pick sensible X/Y/Colour variables and skip anything the current file doesn't have.

Dashboard preset — globe with currents, 3D track, and stacked plots

Globe, 3D & Overlays

  • Globe — the glider's GPS track on an interactive 3D globe
  • 3D View — the dive track in 3D with bathymetry
  • Copernicus overlays — drape satellite/model surface fields over the globe: Chlorophyll-a, Temperature, Salinity, O₂, pH, Biomass, Sea Surface Height
  • Surface currents — an animated particle-flow field of Copernicus surface currents
  • DAC arrows — per-dive depth-averaged current vectors, shown when the file provides them

Globe with a Copernicus chlorophyll overlay

Copernicus Setup

The surface overlays and currents are fetched live from Copernicus Marine, which needs a (free) account and a one-time login:

  1. Register for a free account at marine.copernicus.eu/register.
  2. Install the toolbox: 
    pip install copernicusmarine
  3. Log in (stores your credentials locally), then restart Glider Playground: 
    copernicusmarine login

Once you're logged in, the overlay layers fetch on demand. Until then the app will prompt you with whichever of these steps is missing.

Plotting & Inspecting

By default, presets drive the plots. Flip on the Advanced toggle (top bar) to take manual control — choosing X, Y, and Colour variables, plus QC, filters, phases and more.

  • Box zoom — click and drag on the plot
  • Axis sliders — trim the X, Y, or colour range precisely
  • Inspector — hover the plot to read exact values for the nearest sample in a floating card
  • Colour palette — pick from a range of oceanographic colour maps
  • Reset — restore the view, overlays, and chat to a clean state
  • Download — save the current plot as a PNG

Profiles

If a file contains dive profiles, a Profiles navigator appears. Step through individual profiles or cycles, filter by direction (upcast / downcast / transect), or view everything at once.

Quality Control (Advanced)

QC flags follow the Argo convention: 0 No QC, 1 Good, 2 Probably good, 3 Probably bad, 4 Bad, 5 Changed, 8 Interpolated, 9 Missing. Samples are always filtered to the allowed set (default 0,1,2,5,8) — click a QC chip to show only that flag, click again to restore all.

There's no separate Filter Time / Interpolate / Clean toggle — that processing always runs, and the QC chips are the only control:

  • PRES gaps up to 5 minutes are always interpolated (flag 8); a longer gap is a real data gap and is left unfilled.
  • Exact 0.0 fill values in PRES/TEMP/CNDC are always flagged missing (flag 9) and nulled.
  • NaT and out-of-order timestamps are always dropped outright (not flag-gated — they aren't meaningful data). Other out-of-range timestamps (pre-1990 / future) are flagged bad (flag 4) and filterable like anything else.

Jelly — Notifications

Jelly is a passive notification bubble (bottom-right). It stays hidden until there's something worth showing — a new release, or Copernicus overlay setup help — then reveals itself with a dot and lists the notes.

Uninstall

pip uninstall glider-playground

Developer Docs

See OVERVIEW.md for an internal reference on the architecture, data pipeline, and deployment.

License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

National Oceanography Centre

Developed by Orlando Prugel-Bennett at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC).

© 2026 National Oceanography Centre.

Key dates

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Data sourced directly from PyPI's database.
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Latest release

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PyPI data
Data sourced directly from PyPI's database.
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Credits

Author: Orlando Prugel-Bennett

License

Apache-2.0

Requires

Python >=3.9

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