This website contains an online, searchable collection of current meter records and other types of time series from deep water moorings. It contains approximately 2000 current records from the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) plus more than 8000 non-WOCE records. Most of the data in this archive are from moorings that were in place for at least 6 months, in deep water. Most were made by current meters but the archive also includes time series from temperature recorders, SeaBird TPC recorders, pressure recorders, etc. All can be downloaded.
The dataset was assembled over a period of many years by the Buoy Group at Oregon State University. When the Buoy Group disbanded, these records, which are in the public domain, were made available here as a public service. We hope they will continue to be useful to students and others engaged in oceanographic research.
You can search the Archive by either of two methods, by clicking on the two links below:
The Basin Search takes you immediately to a list of ocean basins, and then to a list of experiments from each basin. There, you can select an experiment, read about it, and download its data records.
The Filtered Search allows you to supply multiple criteria - such as experiment name, the name of the PI, instrument depth, epoch, etc. A list of current meter records that meet the criteria will then appear, allowing you to select some or all of the records for downloading to your computer. You may also view descriptive statistics for each record.
This website also contains several electronic data reports from Buoy Group experiments. Each data report contains a description of the experiment, downloadable copies of all measurements, and descriptive graphs. You can click on the link below to access the data reports.
All of the data records on this website are supplied in an easy-to-read ASCII format, which you can read about here.
These records have been examined carefully and have been brought up to a single, uniform standard. In practice, this means that unrealistic spikes have been removed and runs of clearly bad data, due to instrument malfunctions, have been excised. Many of the older time series with a time increment shorter than one hour have been filtered and subsampled to produce series with a one hour time increment.
We wish to point out that if you use any of these data in published work, it would be generous to give credit to those who performed the experiments. The principal investigators and their institutions are provided here in the data descriptions.
We also have a small subset of shallow water and historical current records gathered by the OSU Buoy Group over the years, beginning in 1965. Many of these are from the Oregon and California shelf and slope. The earliest moorings were the Buoy Group's "baby steps", before we learned to make deep-sea moorings.
Finally, we have included a copy of the browser-readable CD that the WOCE Current Meter Data Assembly Center (CMDAC) distributed at the conclusion of WOCE. You can access the CD here. It is of interest because it contains the WOCE current records in both the ASCII stranger format and netCDF. netCDF was actually the official WOCE data format. This browser-readable CD also contains a great deal of statistical information, such as flow statistics.
If you haven't visited this site lately you can find out what's new here. Please send any comments or questions about this website or the data to the webmaster.
