Clustering solution for flux estimates based on gas bubble stream observations in single beam echo-sounder data using gridded averaging

Script for doing flare clustering of single beam echosounder flare data. See theory.pdf for theory.

Contact info: Knut Ola Dølven knut.o.dolven@uit.no

What is it?

A package that does flare clustering which is a necessary process in estimating seabed gas flux using single beam echosounder data (see Veloso et al. (2015), doi: 10.1002/lom3.10024). The package includes:

1. Automated flare clustering according to method described in Veloso et al. (2015), doi: 10.1002/lom3.10024
2. A new method for calcualting total flux from clusters called "Gridded averaging" which solves some issues with the original flux estimation solution.
3. A method for estimating seep area using the acoustic footprint of the echosounder. Previously, only the accumulated acoustic footprint area have been used.
4. The possibility of using the amount of overlapping seep area instead of just distance (which has been the conventional method) is also added. This comes into play when multiple seeps are overlapping (where seeps can be excluded even with a lot of overlapping area). There's an option is to choose between half-radius distance or percent overlapping area. I recommend using percent overlapping area as threshold.

The package can use any input data following the standard output format from VBA-lab in ESP-3 or FlareHunter. Test_data is included. Returns an excel sheet with the flowrate, area, and depth of the clusters as well as a .txt file listing the name of flare observations which were included in which clusters and which flare observations were non-clustered (lonely flareas).

Initiation

There are two initation options which is set by the beginning of the INITIATION section in the clustering.py script by choosing the "runGUI" parameter to runGUI == False or runGUI == True . The former makes the script run dynamically as a normal python script while the latter returns a simple gui for giving the input parameters.

Inputs: filepath: string Path and filename of the excel file to be stored.
closenessparameter: string The preferred method for determining wether two flares should be clustered or not. Options are 'distance' or 'area'. The former uses the distance between the center of the flare observations as clustering criterion while the latter uses the amount of shared area between two flare observations
threshold: The threshold that determines if two flare observations are to be clustered. If closenessparam = 'area' the threshold is the fractional (between 0 and 1) overlap between the flares. If closenessparam = 'distance' the threshold is the distance between ' the flares number of flare footprint radii. method: The chosen method for calculating the flowrate for the cluster. Can be either 'legacy' or 'griddedaverage'. The legacy method is described in Veloso et al., 2015 and gridded_average in the theory document in this repository.

Ouputs: DFclustered: pandas dataframe Dataframe containing the clustered flare data.

Creates an .xslx file with clustered flare data named "filename + clustered.xlsx" and stores it in the same folder as filename. Creates a plot if plot=True. Creates a .txt file with the names of the flares in each cluster and the cluster name and the names of the flares that were not clustered.

Contents

clustering.py:

Author: Knut Ola Dølven, knut.o.dolven@uit.no License: MIT

The main file which contains a FUNCTIONS section and an INITIATION section for the clustering program. The script starts with the FUNCTIONS section and the INITIATION section is at the end of the script. The script is set up to work with output excel files from ESP3 with the following headers:

FieldName,AverageLatCFoot,AverageLonCFoot,AverageXCFoot AverageYCFoot,UTMzone,AverageRadiusFoot,FlowRaterealBRS,

but this can easily be changed within the code and support for various header and filetypes is easy to implement and will be implemented soon.

FUNCTIONS

loadflaredata: Loads the FlareHunter/ESP3 excel dataset. The excel file contains data from the FlareHunter/ESP3 experiment. The data is stored in a pandas dataframe. The function takes a filepath and a column identified input for the excel file which defines the column names in the excel file. It is also possible to define the UTM zone explicitly instead of loading it into the dataframe from the excel file.

get_distance: Calculates the distance between the points in a vector with coordinates xlocs and ylocs. The function returns a matrix with the distances between all the points in the vector.

getsharedarea: Calculates the shared area between two circles with radius R1 and R2 and mto different origins located at xloc and yloc. The function returns the shared area. Reference: Weisstein, Eric W. "Circle-Circle Intersection." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Circle-CircleIntersection.html

getareaof_footprint: Calculates the area of the footprint of the acoustic beam of the SB echosounder at a specified depth. The function returns the area of the footprint.

getcloseflares: Finds all the flares that are within a certain distance of each other or shares a certain amount of area. The function use UTM x an y or lan/lot coordinates and footprint radius to return a list of pairs with indices of flares that are defined as close to each other according to the closeness_param and threshold parameters. Can calculate closeness based on distance between footprint center or the fractional (%) shared area between the footprints.

clusterflareslegacy: Clusters flares that have overlapping areas/are within a certain distance of each other (this is done through getcloseflares) and calculates the total area and flowrate of each cluster. The function returns a dictionary with the cluster info. Based on method described in Veloso et al., 2015, doi: 10.1002/lom3.10024

clusterflowrategridded_averaging: Calculates the total area and flowrate of a flare cluster by gridding the cluster area, calculating the flowrate of each grid cell for each flare in the cluster, and averaging the flowrate of each grid cell over all the flares in the cluster. The function returns a dictionary with the cluster info. Based on method described in the memo accompanying this script.

saveclustereddata: Creates a dataframe with clustered flares and their locations and flowrates together with the flares that were not clustered as individual clusters. Saves the dataframe to an excel file with path/filename filepath.

writeclustertextfile: Writes a textfile listing all the flare observations included in each cluster as well as all the flare observations that were not clustered.

IMPORTANT NOTES

1. In the GUI the strings should not have quotation marks
2. The path and filename of the excel file needs to have double backslashe's if you're running windows, i.e. the path C:\Users\ should be written C:\Users\.

conversion.py: (included to avoid dependency issues)

Copied from the utm package by Tobias Bieniek Bidirectional UTM-WGS84 converter for python Author: Tobias Bieniek Version: 0.7.0 License: MIT Source: https://pypi.org/project/utm/

Copied from the python utm package to avoid any dependency issues.

Acknowledgments

• Marie Stetzler - For helping out with test data, explaining the manual proceedures in VBA-Lab/FlareHunter, initial testing and debugging
• Mario Veloso - For reading theory, check of equations, discussing the concepts and providing insight into the original clustering process
• Benedicte Ferré - For valuable discussions on use cases along the development path