Brief description of ACM13

The Deep Basin Experiment took place in and around the Brazil Basin, a region west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge stretching from the Ceara Rise near the equator in the north, to the Santos Plateau - Rio Grande Rise system near 30 deg S. A principal objective was to understand the mean circulation below the thermocline; the Brazil Basin was selected because it is a region of expected low eddy KE, a useful attribute in a program aimed at the mean flow.

Five current meter arrays were deployed at passages that connect the Brazil Basin to neighboring regions. We are concerned here with six moorings that were installed by IFM-Kiel in the Hunter Channel, a deep passage at the southeastern corner of the basin, and two additional moorings north of Hunter Channel. The moorings were installed in December 1992 and recovered about a year and a half later.

Related publications

Zenk, W., G. Siedler, B. Lenz and N.G. Hogg (1999): Antarctic Bottom Water flow through the Hunter Channel. J. Phys. Oceanogr., 29(11), 2785-2801.

Paetzold, J., K. Heidland, W. Zenk and G. Siedler (1996): On Bathymetry of the Hunter Channel. In: Wefer, G., W.H. Berger, G. Siedler and D.J. Webb (Eds.): The South Atlantic: Present and Past Circulation. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 355-361.

Speer, K.G. and W. Zenk (1993): The flow of Antarctic Bottom Water into the Brazil Basin. J. Phys. Oceanogr., 23, 2667-2682.

Speer, K. G., W. Zenk, G. Siedler, J. Patzold and C. Heidland (1992): First resolution of bottom water flow through the Hunter Channel in the South Atlantic. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 113, 287-292.

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.