ACM10 (Deep Basin)

This component of the Deep Basin experiment produced 22 current meter records from 6 moorings. You can view metadata and/or download the records by clicking on links in the table below. A brief description of the experiment also is available. Each current meter record is identified in the table by its depth and the name of the mooring. You may want to look at a map of the array first to see where the moorings were. If you download any of the current meter records you should review the note on file format. From here you can also move up one level to the list of WOCE experiments.

mooringinstr depthinstr typedatesmetadatadownload
WHOI 936 3297 meters VACM 29 Sep 92 - 01 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 936 3896 meters VACM 29 Sep 92 - 01 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 936 4096 meters VACM 29 Sep 92 - 01 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 936 4297 meters VACM 29 Sep 92 - 01 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 937 3900 meters VACM 29 Sep 92 - 01 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 937 4100 meters VACM 29 Sep 92 - 01 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 937 4300 meters VACM 29 Sep 92 - 01 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 938 2993 meters VACM 30 Sep 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 938 3293 meters VACM 30 Sep 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 938 3593 meters VACM 30 Sep 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 938 3892 meters VACM 30 Sep 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 938 4093 meters VACM 30 Sep 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 938 4292 meters VACM 30 Sep 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 938 4485 meters VACM 30 Sep 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 939 3885 meters VACM 01 Oct 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 939 4085 meters VACM 01 Oct 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 939 4285 meters VACM 01 Oct 92 - 31 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 940 3907 meters VACM 02 Oct 92 - 30 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 940 4107 meters VACM 02 Oct 92 - 30 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 940 4307 meters VACM 02 Oct 92 - 30 May 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 941 3899 meters VACM 02 Oct 92 - 03 Jun 94 view metadata download record
WHOI 941 4099 meters VACM 02 Oct 92 - 03 Jun 94 view metadata download record

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Brief description of ACM10

(This description is taken from the Woods Hole data report, WHOI-97-01.)

The objective of this part of the Deep Basin program was to measure the northward flow of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) out of the Brazil Basin in the South Atlantic and into the Guiana Basin in the North Atlantic. A current meter array of six moorings was set for about 600 days across the opening at the equator between the Brazil Basin and the Guiana Basin west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The mooring array was designed to extend in a north-south direction at 36 deg W with 6 moorings equally spaced between 1 deg N and 1.5 deg S (see map). These locations evenly filled the passage between the Brazil and Guiana Basins from north to south, and put the array at approximately the east-west center of the almost perfectly zonal gap that steers the AABW. The depths of the Vector Averaging Current Meters (VACMs) were chosen to optimize measurement of the AABW. All six moorings had current meters placed at roughly 3900, 4100, and 4300 meter depths. The two moorings at roughly 1 deg N and S of the equator each had an additional VACM close to 3300 meters in depth to provide more information about the vertical shear and levels of no motion. One mooring, placed almost exactly on the equator, had VACMs at 2993, 3593, and 4485 meters in addition to the nominal depths mentioned above. Also on the equatorial mooring were four Aanderaa current meters, placed at shallower levels for use by scientists at the Institut fur Meereskunde, Kiel, Germany.

CTD profiles were taken near each mooring and between mooring locations during both the launch and mooring recovery cruises. The data report (referenced below) contains plots showing temperature and salinity traces, TS diagrams, and contoured vertical sections, as well as plots of the filtered current meter time series.

Related publications

Hall, M.M., J.A. Whitehead and M.S. McCartney (1994): Moored measurements of Antarctic Bottom Water at the Equator. International WOCE Newsletter No. 17, 5-8.

Hall, M.M., M. McCartney and J.A. Whitehead (1997): Antarctic Bottom Water flux in the equatorial western Atlantic. J. Phys. Oceanog., 27(9), 1903-1926.

Tarbell, S.A., J.A.Whitehead, M.M.Hall, and M.S.McCartney (1997): Trans-Equatorial Bottom Water Flow in the Western Atlantic. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Technical Report WHOI-97-01.

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Format of the current records

These files have been compressed with the ZIP compression utility. After downloading them, you will need to expand them. On a PC, WinZip or Pkunzip will do the job. Other utilities are available for the Unix and Macintosh environments. After expansion, you will have ascii files in OSU's stranger format.

The stranger format begins with several lines of header information that are meant to be machine-readable. They contain a Fortran format specification that will be useful in reading the file, a pointer to the first line of data, and a description of the data. Each line of the current record itself contains the time of the sample, the values recorded, and a line count.

Please be aware that end-of-line in these files is a carriage-return plus line-feed (the PC convention). This means that in a Unix environment (where a single line-feed serves as end-of-line) you may want to remove the carriage-returns.

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