The use of IFS is since recently allowing to measure the emission line fluxes
of an increasingly large number of star-forming galaxies both locally and at
high redshift. The main goal of this study is to review the most widely used
empirical oxygen calibrations, O3N2 and N2, by using new direct abundance
measurements. We pay special attention to the expected uncertainty of these
calibrations as a function of the index value or abundance derived and the
presence of possible systematic offsets. This is possible thanks to the
analysis of the most ambitious compilation of Te-based HII regions to date.
This new dataset compiles the Te-based abundances of 603 HII regions extracted
from the literature but also includes new measurements from the CALIFA survey.
Besides providing new and improved empirical calibrations for the gas
abundance, we also present here a comparison between our revisited calibrations
with a total of 3423 additional CALIFA HII complexes with abundances derived
using the ONS calibration by Pilyugin et al. (2010). The combined analysis of
Te-based and ONS abundances allows us to derive their most accurate calibration
to date for both the O3N2 and N2 single-ratio indicators, in terms of all
statistical significance, quality and coverage of the space of parameters. In
particular, we infer that these indicators show shallower abundance
dependencies and statistically-significant offsets compared to those of Pettini
and Pagel (2004), Nagao et al. (2006) and P\'erez-Montero and Contini (2009).
The O3N2 and N2 indicators can be empirically applied to derive oxygen
abundances calibrations from either direct abundance determinations with random
errors of 0.18 and 0.16, respectively, or from indirect ones (but based on a
large amount of data) reaching an average precision of 0.08 and 0.09 dex
(random) and 0.02 and 0.08 dex (systematic; compared to the direct
estimations),respectively.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&