Satellite Tracking Data Processing

Today was the culmination of something I have been poking at for several weeks. I significantly optimized one of the data processing tasks. Something that used to take about 4 hours per day now takes about 20 minutes. One of the things that happens behind the scenes as part of the Satellite Tracking and Analysis Tool (STAT - the engine behind the seaturtle.org satellite tracking website) is sampling of environmental data for every animal location that is collected by STAT. STAT users are able to export their data from the system and get access to all of the sampled environmental data. In this case, the process determines if it is wet or dry (water or land) underneath each animal location, and keeps up to date as new animal locations are added every day. Now that that is done I just have to do the same with data sampling of sea surface temperature and chlorophyll :)