ACM28 (MORENA)

This experiment produced 12 current meter records from 4 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 - June 1995

mooringinstr depthinstr typedatesmetadatadownload
Mooring A 294 meters Aanderaa RCM7 31 May 93 - 23 Jun 93 view metadata download record
Mooring A 794 meters Aanderaa RCM7 31 May 93 - 17 Jul 93 view metadata download record
Mooring A 1194 meters Aanderaa RCM7 31 May 93 - 31 May 95 view metadata download record
Mooring B 843 meters Aanderaa RCM7 30 May 93 - 01 Jun 95 view metadata download record
Mooring B 1243 meters Aanderaa RCM7 30 May 93 - 01 Jun 95 view metadata download record
Mooring B 2243 meters Aanderaa RCM8 30 May 93 - 01 Jun 95 view metadata download record

November 1993 - September 1994

mooringinstr depthinstr typedatesmetadatadownload
Mooring C 885 meters Aanderaa RCM8 22 Nov 93 - 19 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring C 1285 meters Aanderaa RCM7 22 Nov 93 - 19 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring C 3085 meters Aanderaa RCM8 22 Nov 93 - 19 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring D 153 meters Aanderaa RCM4S 22 Nov 93 - 19 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring D 653 meters Aanderaa RCM7 22 Nov 93 - 19 Sep 94 view metadata download record
Mooring D 2853 meters Aanderaa RCM8 22 Nov 93 - 19 Sep 94 view metadata download record


Description of WOCE component ACM28

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:

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.

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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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