Measurement

Introduction

Any data ingested in or processed by Paricia takes de form of either Measurement or Report objects. Contrary to other elements of Paricia, these are not meant to be created manually via de Admin pages, but rather in the background when importing or when validating data.

Do not edit measurements in the Admin

Directly editing measurements in the Admin pages is discouraged since it can result in inconsistencies between raw, validated and reported data. Use the validation tools instead. See the validation section

In both cases, they represent a single data point in a time series, corresponding to a specific Variable at a specific Station. Only data corresponding to public stations will be available for checking in the case of anonymous users, whereas registered users could also check data from internal stations.

For the case of Reports, the data point is a post-processed magnitude averaged (or accumulated) over hourly, daily and monthly periods of time. Only data that has been validated is used when calculating the reports. Report data is what is used in the report view to generate plots, and can be downloaded. It is typically what most people will be interested in checking.

The Measurement represent an input data point loaded from a file, with all its properties and metadata. Most of its properties can be edited during the validation process, but the original raw data is always preserved and can be recovered when/if needed.

Both type objects derive from a MeasurementBase abstract class that contains the common elements, which in turns derives from TimescaleModel. This top parent class is the one that enables all the efficient time series management of the data in Paricia.

Figure 1: UML diagram of the Measurement app models.

Components

MeasurementBase

Bases: TimescaleModel

Base class for all the measurement related entries.

It contains the barebone attributes that any measurement entry will likely need, although this is enforced only for station, variable and value. Maximum and minimum are very likely to be present in most cases, but might not be there in some occasions, therefore the possibility of nulling them.

Attributes:

Name	Type	Description
time	TimescaleDateTimeField	Time of the measurement.
station	Station	Station this measurement belongs to.
variable	Variable	Variable being measured.
value	Decimal	Value of the measurement.
maximum	Decimal	Maximum value of the measurement. Mostly useful for reports or when the measurement represents an average over time.
minimum	Decimal	Minimum value of the measurement. Mostly useful for reports or when the measurement represents an average over time.

Measurement

Class to store the measurements and their validation status.

This class holds the value of a given variable and station at a specific time, as well as auxiliary information such as maximum and minimum values, depth and direction, for vector quantities. All of these have a raw version where a backup of the original data is kept, should this change at any point.

Flags to monitor its validation status, if the data is active (and therefore can be used for reporting) and if it has actually been used for that is also included.

Attributes:

Name	Type	Description
depth	int	Depth of the measurement.
direction	Decimal	Direction of the measurement, useful for vector quantities.
raw_value	Decimal	Original value of the measurement.
raw_maximum	Decimal	Original maximum value of the measurement.
raw_minimum	Decimal	Original minimum value of the measurement.
raw_direction	Decimal	Original direction of the measurement.
raw_depth	int	Original depth of the measurement.
is_validated	bool	Flag to indicate if the measurement has been validated.
is_active	bool	Flag to indicate if the measurement is active. An inactive measurement is not used for reporting

Report

Holds the different reporting data.

It also keeps track of which data has already been used when creating the reports.

Attributes:

Name	Type	Description
report_type	str	Type of report. It can be hourly, daily or monthly.
completeness	Decimal	Completeness of the report. Eg. a daily report with 24 hourly measurements would have a completeness of 100%.