Download BEST Current Meter Records

12 records from 4 moorings are available. Each record begins with a header that contains descriptive metadata: mooring position, instrument depth, the name of the PI, etc. This is followed by one or more time series. Most records contain speed, direction, northward component, eastward component, and temperature. Some contain pressure. The header begins with a Fortran format specification and some line counts that will be useful if you write software to manipulate these files.

The current records have been compressed and have been grouped by mooring. Each compressed file is a zip archive that contains all the current records from one mooring. In a PC environment, zipped files can be extracted from an archive and expanded by programs like Pkunzip and WinZip. Similar utilities are available for the Unix and Macintosh environments.

The current records within the archives have names like best2c_str. The first portion of the name indicates that the current record is from BEST. The next two characters indicate that it is from the 3rd meter (c = 3) of Mooring 2, counting from the top of the mooring. The final segment of the file name indicates that the record has OSU's stranger format.

Please be aware that each line of these files is terminated by a carriage-return, line-feed combination. This is the PC end-of-line convention. If you are working in a Unix environment, where a single line-feed is the EOL convention, you may want to remove the carriage-returns.

Click here to return to the previous document.