ACM24 (FSU component of Deep Basin)

This component of the Deep Basin experiment produced 26 current meter records from 8 moorings. From here you can

If you download any of the records you should read the note on file format.

mooringinstr depthinstr typedatesmetadatadownload
Mooring 1 1618 meters modified Geodyne 101 01 Oct 93 - 29 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 1 1731 meters modified Geodyne 101 01 Oct 93 - 29 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 2 900 meters Potok II 01 Oct 93 - 07 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring 2 1800 meters modified Geodyne 101 01 Oct 93 - 28 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 2 2800 meters modified Geodyne 101 01 Oct 93 - 12 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring 2 3391 meters modified Geodyne 101 01 Oct 93 - 28 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 3 1800 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 28 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 3 2800 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 23 May 94 view metadata download record
Mooring 3 3673 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 28 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 4 900 meters Potok II 30 Sep 93 - 06 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring 4 1800 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 27 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 4 2810 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 27 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 4 3915 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 27 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 5 900 meters Potok II 30 Sep 93 - 06 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring 5 1800 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 5 4053 meters modified Geodyne 101 30 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 6 900 meters Potok II 29 Sep 93 - 05 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring 6 1800 meters modified Geodyne 101 29 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 6 2800 meters modified Geodyne 101 29 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 6 4272 meters modified Geodyne 101 29 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 7 1800 meters modified Geodyne 101 29 Sep 93 - 20 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 7 2800 meters modified Geodyne 101 29 Sep 93 - 20 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 7 4340 meters modified Geodyne 101 29 Sep 93 - 20 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 9 4588 meters modified Geodyne 101 27 Sep 93 - 26 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 9 4688 meters modified Geodyne 101 27 Sep 93 - 26 Mar 95 view metadata download record
Mooring 9 4781 meters Potok II 28 Sep 93 - 04 Sep 94 view metadata download record

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Brief description of acm24

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.

Current meter arrays were deployed in the interior of the basin and across passages that connect the Brazil Basin to neighboring regions. Each array was in the water for approximately two years. We are concerned here with a line of 10 moorings that was placed in the center of the basin, with a roughly east-west alignment (see map), by Florida State University. Eight of the moorings were recovered.

The ACM24 array was designed with two primary goals:

All but one of the moorings contained a Russian Potok II current meter at a depth of 900m, and modified Geodyne 101s at 1800m, 2800m, and 100m above the bottom. The remaining mooring contained two Geodynes, one placed 120m above the bottom and the other 7m above the bottom.

Related publications

De Madron, X.D., and G. Weatherly (1994): Circulation, transport and bottom boundary layers of the deep currents in the Brazil Basin. J. Marine Res., 52(4), 583-638.

Mercier, H., G.L. Weatherly and M. Arhan (2000): Bottom water throughflows at the Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande fracture zones. Geophys. Res. Letters, 27(10), 1505-1506.

Weatherly, G.L., Y.Y. Kim and E.A. Kontar (2000): Eulerian measurements of the North Atlantic Deep Water Deep Western Boundary Current at 18S. J. Phys. Oceanog., 30(5), 971-986.

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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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