[postgis-users] PostGIS data in the marine environment

[Terry]

We have been investigating how to get our marine data into and out of 
our PostGIS
- GeoServer - GeoNetwork on a CentOS system, and  we are looking for 
some advice.

We often have the situation of marine data obtained from a sonde lowered 
vertically through the water column.
The resulting data consists of a lat-long location, datetime, and 
sensors typically measuring water temperature,
conductivity,  dissolved oxygen and chlorophyll fluorescence as a 
function of pressure.

We have typically created CSV files and entered them into PostGIS. We 
create a spatial index based upon the
2D lat-long position.  This approach does not seem to maximally use the 
"relatedness" of the cast information.

We are considering creating for each horizontal location and datetime a 
series of linestrings of (pressure, parameter) tuples,
and then reading these into PostGIS.  The resulting table records could 
then be up to a thousand times shorter, and searches potentially faster.
This may imply that we need to write an application to form these 
linestrings, and another to create SQL commands.

Alternatively, we are looking for a nice way to create NetCDF data from 
our profile data, and then input that into PostGIS.

Any suggestions on contemplated approaches, or advice or links to prior 
technology for a similar situation?

-- terry