7. Altering oce Defaults

Dan Kelley (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-5911)

2024-08-17

Abstract. When R loads the oce package, certain defaults are defined for values such as the chosen equation of state, the expected timezone, etc. This vignette lists those defaults and explains how (with caution) they may be altered with the ~/.Rprofile file.

The table below shows the default values of some quantities that oce uses in its processing. In most cases, these values make their way into the package as default values of function parameters via calls to the getOption() function. See ?plotTS for an example.

Note that any of these values may be altered in the user’s ~/.Rprofile file. For example, a user preferring that the old UNESCO equation of state be used in operations like plotting CTD data, might insert the following line in the ~/.Rprofile file:

options(oceEOS = "gsw")

but it should be noted that setting values in ~/.Rprofile will render the user’s code non-reproducible (unless that file is provided along with the analysis code).

The preferred method is not to use ~/.Rprofile, but instead to specify the desired properties as arguments to relevant functions. For example, calling plotTS(..., eos="unesco") instead of letting eos take on the default value of "gsw". (It is the ability to specify a choice by such a parameter that is indicated in the right-most column of the following table.)

Name Value Selected by a function parameter
oceAbbreviateTimeRange TRUE yes
oceDebug 0 yes
oceDrawTimeRange TRUE yes
oceEOS "gsw" yes
oceMar c(3, 3, 2, 2) yes
oceMgp c(2.0, 0.7, 0) yes
oceTimeFormat "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" yes
oceTz "UTC" yes
oceUnitBracket "[" no
webtide "/usr/local/WebTide" yes

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