Access and plot global ocean current dataset-ECCO V4r4 in Colab

I tried to plot the U and V component of the ROI’s historical ocean current HYCOM data. However, the result of GEE plotting is not reasonable from what I see, with no variation after 2013:

Therefore, I switched to another ocean current dataset. But I realize there are not many options: 1) OSCAR: it is used in one of the publication:

Synergistic Use of Remote Sensing and Modeling to Assess an Anomalously High Chlorophyll-a Event…

However, the dataset is 5-days (I think) and requires more computations but I want to do it all online so I decide to use other sources.

2) ECCO https://ecco-group.org/products-ECCO-V4r4.htm: “The “Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean” (ECCO) consortium makes the best possible estimates of ocean circulation and its role in climate.”

I used to see ECCO data in NASA’s sea-level change portal:

NASA Sea Level Change Portal | Data Analysis Tool

Unfortunately, the current data is not here and the version is not up to date.

Therefore, I tried to take to hard way following their GitHub tutorial, literally the best python tutorial I saw in scientific graphing:

https://github.com/ECCO-GROUP/ECCO-v4-Python-Tutorial/tree/master/Tutorials_as_Jupyter_Notebooks

Here I shared my code to plot the U component of water velocity:

Google Colaboratory

I decide to play everything in Colab for the reasons:

1. no configuration (you may need to figure out some package installs, but here I make it work through)
2. no occupying my local drive (here 13Gb data)
3. usually faster than my little MBP
4. it is free
5. easy to manage and easy to share with a team member