Product Information"

In CopernicusMarine: Search Download and Handle Data from Copernicus Marine Service Information

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)
eval_chunks <- curl::has_internet()

Before you start downloading data, you first need to know which data you need and for which purpose. And not unimportant: you need to know where to find it. Although data discovery is not the primary objective of this package, it provides several instruments to obtain product information.

The Web Browser

Perhaps the easiest way to find products and layers is via the online catalogue. To streamline your workflow using the web browser, you should check vignette("translate"). That vignette explains how you can copy a request from the web browser catalogue and use it in R.

Listing Products

To get a complete overview of all available products, you can list them with either cms_products_list() or cms_products_list2():

library(CopernicusMarine)

cms_products_list() |> head(3)

cms_products_list2() |> head(3)

The first returns a data.frame complete with al sorts of meta information about the type of variables in the product, the spatio-temporal coverage, number of vertical layers, etc. You can use this data.frame to narrow your search by applying a dplyr::filter() on it.

You can even pass arguments that are used to search the online catalogue. These are not well documented. The example below shows how to search for free text and filter on area and variables:

cms_products_list(freeText = "wave",
                  facetValues = list(areas             = list("Europe"),
                                     specificVariables = list("Velocity")))

The reason this is poorly documented is because this function does not use the formal API. Instead it uses the web-form used by the online catalogue. Users should therefore not rely on it too much as it may get discontinued or altered at any time.

Instead, users can use cms_products_list2() which produces a list of products, by using the official API. Unfortunately, this list does not contain any additional information. For this purpose users can refer to cms_product_metadata(), cms_product_details(), or cms_product_services() as described below.

Product Details

With cms_product_details() you will get some descriptive information about your product. Nothing too fancy, but it will help you understand what the product is all about.

cms_product_details("GLOBAL_ANALYSISFORECAST_PHY_001_024") |> summary()

Product Metadata

When subsetting a dataset with cms_download_subset(), the most tricky thing is discovering what the available ranges are for its dimensions. You can use cms_product_metadata() for this purpose. It returns a named list.

meta_info <- cms_product_metadata("GLOBAL_ANALYSISFORECAST_PHY_001_024")

## Get the dimension properties for the first layer in this product
meta_info$properties[[1]]$`cube:dimensions` |> summary()
## Get the variable properties for the first layer in this product
meta_info$properties[[1]]$`cube:variables` |> summary()

Another way to get the dimension ranges is by setting up a stars proxy object (see vignette("proxy")) and call st_dimensions() on it:

library(stars) |> suppressMessages()

myproxy <- cms_zarr_proxy(
    product       = "GLOBAL_ANALYSISFORECAST_PHY_001_024",
    layer         = "cmems_mod_glo_phy-cur_anfc_0.083deg_P1D-m",
    asset         = "timeChunked")
st_dimensions(myproxy)

Product Services

If you want a more raw access point to your data, you can use cms_product_services(). It will present a data.frame for your product with all services provided by Copernicus. You can use any of the columns with the "_href" suffix to get an URL of a specific service. If you want to access those directly, you are on your own. It is easier to use any of the wrappers provided by this package to access the data.

cms_product_services("GLOBAL_ANALYSISFORECAST_PHY_001_024")

CopernicusMarine documentation built on July 5, 2026, 5:06 p.m.