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.
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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
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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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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mooring instr depth instr type dates metadata download
Mooring 1
1618 meters
modified Geodyne 101
01 Oct 93 - 29 Mar 95
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Mooring 1
1731 meters
modified Geodyne 101
01 Oct 93 - 29 Mar 95
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Mooring 2
900 meters
Potok II
01 Oct 93 - 07 Sep 94
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Mooring 2
1800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
01 Oct 93 - 28 Mar 95
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Mooring 2
2800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
01 Oct 93 - 12 Sep 94
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Mooring 2
3391 meters
modified Geodyne 101
01 Oct 93 - 28 Mar 95
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Mooring 3
1800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 28 Mar 95
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Mooring 3
2800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 23 May 94
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Mooring 3
3673 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 28 Mar 95
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Mooring 4
900 meters
Potok II
30 Sep 93 - 06 Sep 94
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Mooring 4
1800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 27 Mar 95
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Mooring 4
2810 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 27 Mar 95
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Mooring 4
3915 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 27 Mar 95
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Mooring 5
900 meters
Potok II
30 Sep 93 - 06 Sep 94
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Mooring 5
1800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95
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Mooring 5
4053 meters
modified Geodyne 101
30 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95
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Mooring 6
900 meters
Potok II
29 Sep 93 - 05 Sep 94
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Mooring 6
1800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
29 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95
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Mooring 6
2800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
29 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95
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Mooring 6
4272 meters
modified Geodyne 101
29 Sep 93 - 23 Mar 95
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Mooring 7
1800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
29 Sep 93 - 20 Mar 95
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Mooring 7
2800 meters
modified Geodyne 101
29 Sep 93 - 20 Mar 95
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Mooring 7
4340 meters
modified Geodyne 101
29 Sep 93 - 20 Mar 95
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Mooring 9
4588 meters
modified Geodyne 101
27 Sep 93 - 26 Mar 95
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Mooring 9
4688 meters
modified Geodyne 101
27 Sep 93 - 26 Mar 95
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Mooring 9
4781 meters
Potok II
28 Sep 93 - 04 Sep 94
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Brief description of acm24
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.
Format of the current records