Measurement · Productivity & Pigments · µg/L

Chlorophyll-a measured fluorometrically

The registry carries no authored label for this measurement, so the name above is the canonical series' own description in metadata/measurement_type.csv (variable.csv holds the authored labels, five today).

NERC P01 CPHLZZXXP06 units UGPL ug/Lkey chlorophyll_a series chlorophyll_a

245,666
values: 610
flagged: 13,934
sampling events: 1973–2021
years: 1
dataset: 0–1,122 m
depth: every month
seasons

Heads-up 610 of these 245,666 values (0.2 %) are flagged by their provider as questionable or bad. The Explorer, the climatology and its anomalies leave them out; do the same when you read the data yourself (cc_qual_ok_sql() in calcofi4r, qual_ok_sql() in calcofi4py).

Measured in

Hydrographic Bottle 245,666 values · 13,934 sampling events · 1973–2021 · 0–1,122 m · 132 grid cells · 196 cruises

series chlorophyll_a · source column chlor_a · flag column chlqua no bound declared 610 flagged · 0.2 %

One row per series, one cell per year, darker with more values — the same strip the front door draws per dataset and a species page draws per taxon. Each row is one dataset's own measurement_type; the label is written once, in the title above.

By depth

Values per depth band at the release grain, one thin bar per series. The bands are the record's own (0-10 … 2000+ m).

By month

Values per calendar month, one row per series: CalCOFI's quarterly cruises show as peaks in the months the ships sail.

Range & quality

bounds: No physical bound is declared for this series in metadata/measurement_type.csv, so nothing is enforced at the ingest and the range below is simply what the release carries.
observed: Hydrographic Bottle chlorophyll_a -0.001 · median 0.16 · 66.11 µg/L (5th–95th percentile 0–1.69)
flags: Hydrographic Bottle chlorophyll_a chlqua on 610 of 245,666 rows: 8 97 · 9 513; qual_ok keeps 245,056. The codes are this dataset's own vocabulary, uninterpreted.
baseline: A monthly climatology exists for this measurement (the release's climatology table: 1993–2013, dataset × grid cell × calendar month × 10 m bin), so the Explorer can draw anomalies against it rather than values.

Related measurements

Bottle chlorophyll-a btl_chlorophyll_a · CTD Cast Files · 1993–2025 · 112,917 values · P01 CPHLZZXX the same quantity from the CTD files' own bottle samples — plausibly the same physical bottles, so merging them would count the bottle dataset twice

The same quantity from another platform or another kind of sample, each its own page and never merged into this one: a dataset's own bottle samples would count that dataset twice, an underway intake is not a cast, and a replicate is not a mean. The reason is the record's (related[].why).

Ways in

Explorermaps, sections and time series of this measurement — opens prefilled
https://calcofi.io/explore/?var=chlorophyll_a
Explorer · a depth section vs normalthe newest cruise's section against the climatology baseline
https://calcofi.io/explore/?lens=section&var=chlorophyll_a&anom=1
db-querySQL in your browser — the shell opens with this query
https://calcofi.io/db-query/?sql=SELECT+%2A+FROM+__TBL%3Aobs_env__+WHERE+measurement_type+%3D+%27chlorophyll_a%27+LIMIT+100%3B
ERDDAP · Hydrographic BottleCalCOFI's own server, the Hydrographic Bottle table constrained to this series
https://erddap.calcofi.io/erddap/tabledap/calcofi_bottle.html?&measurement_type=%22chlorophyll_a%22
Parquetobs_env is partitioned by measurement_type in the content-addressed store — resolved through the release catalog, never a path built by hand
```
SELECT * FROM read_json('…/v2026.09.10/catalog.json')
-- objects[] WHERE table = 'obs_env'
--   AND partition_value = 'chlorophyll_a'
```

library(calcofi4r)
con <- cc_get_db()                      # the promoted release
tbl(con, "obs_env") |> filter(measurement_type %in% c("chlorophyll_a"))

Python

import calcofi4py as cc
con = cc.cc_get_db()
con.sql("SELECT * FROM obs_env WHERE measurement_type IN ('chlorophyll_a')").df()

This page as data

JSONthis measurement's entry of the release record, verbatim
https://calcofi.io/measurements/chlorophyll_a.json

Read from measurements.json of release v2026.09.10, written at release by calcofi4db::build_measurements_catalog() beside taxa.json. The catalog's index is /measurements/; the JSON-LD on this page is a schema.org/DefinedTerm in the NERC P01 term set with a PropertyValue per series.

Cite

Cite the release; each dataset's own citation, licence and DOI are on its page — Hydrographic Bottle. The Explorer's Share → Cite writes it for the view you make.