This experiment produced 10 current meter records from three moorings. You can view metadata and download the records by clicking on links in the table below. Each current meter record is identified in the table by mooring name and depth. A brief description of the experiment also is available. You may want to look at a map to see where the mooring was. 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.
May 1993 - May 1994
May 1994 - November 1994
Return to the top of this page.
The MORENA Project was designed to measure slope and shelf currents
and the associated heat and salt fluxes on the Iberian continental
margin, within the MORENA region, and to evaluate their seasonal
variability.
For this purpose, two lines of four current meter moorings, each with
4 or 5 instruments, were deployed for periods ranging from 6 months to
1 year on the Iberian margin along 41.0 N (by the Univerisity of Lisbon)
and along about 42.3 N (by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography). A
detailed description of the moorings, of their data processing and of
some preliminary results has been published in the MORENA Scientific
and Technical Reports no. 15 for the northern line (Alonso et al., 1995),
and no. 21, for the southern line (Dias et al., 1995).
The MORENA region extends from 40N to 43N and lies between the
coast and 11W (see map). Seaward of the
rather regular and relatively wide continental shelf, the bottom
topography is quite complex. Several submarine canyons indent the
slope in the southern part of the MORENA region, and the southern
line was designed to be placed as far away from their influence as
possible.
The experiment was designed to produce year-long time series of
horizontal velocity and temperature, as well as conductivity and
pressure at some depths, with Aanderaa current meters placed near
the sourthern and the northern boundaries of the MORENA study region.
The intended measurement depths were 100m, in the lower part of the
seasonal surface layer; 300m, well within the Central Water; 800m
and 1200m, near the upper and lower cores of the Mediterranean Water,
respectively; and 2000 or 3000m in the North Atlantic Deep Water
(at levels depending on the depth of the bottom at each mooring).
As described in the MORENA reports mentioned above, there were
several losses of equipment during the experiment and also some
malfunctions. No data were collected from the most westerly mooring
of the northern line. In addition, measurements at 100m were obtained
at only one mooring, Mooring C of the northern line. Measurements at
the 300m design depth were successful in about half of the moorings.
Nevertheless, a total of 22 current meters provided good data, most
of them with complete records.
A related publication:
Return to the top of this page.
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.
Return to the top of this page.
mooring instr depth instr type dates metadata download
Mooring A
56 meters
Aanderaa RCM4S
29 May 93 - 04 May 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring A
256 meters
Aanderaa RCM4S
29 May 93 - 04 May 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring A
1156 meters
Aanderaa RCM4S
29 May 93 - 04 May 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring A
2000 meters
Aanderaa RCM7
29 May 93 - 04 Mar 94
view metadata
download record
mooring instr depth instr type dates metadata download
Mooring B
337 meters
Aanderaa RCM4S
06 May 94 - 17 Nov 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring B
837 meters
Aanderaa RCM4S
07 May 94 - 15 Nov 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring B
2037 meters
Aanderaa RCM7
06 May 94 - 17 Nov 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring C
338 meters
Aanderaa RCM4S
06 May 94 - 16 Nov 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring C
838 meters
Aanderaa RCM4S
07 May 94 - 14 Nov 94
view metadata
download record
Mooring C
1238 meters
Aanderaa RCM7
07 May 94 - 16 Nov 94
view metadata
download record
Description of WOCE component ACM27
Fiuza, A.F.G., M. Hamann, I. Ambar, G. Diaz del Rio, N. Gonzalez and
J.M. Cabanas (1998): Water masses and their circulation off western
Iberia during May 1993. Deep-Sea Res. I, 45(7), 1127-1160.
Format of the current records