Iceland-Faroe Overflow (ACM8)

This component of ACM8 produced 13 current meter records from 7 moorings. You can view metadata and download the records by clicking on links in the table below. A brief description of the experiment also is available. Each current meter record is identified in the table by its depth and the name of the mooring. You may want to look at a map of the array first to see where the moorings were. 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.

mooringinstr depthinstr typedatesmetadatadownload
501 (A) 2281 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 22 Aug 91 view metadata download record
502 (B) 1018 meters Aanderaa RCM5 14 Jul 90 - 14 Aug 91 view metadata download record
503 (C) 1291 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 20 Aug 91 view metadata download record
504 (D) 1135 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 22 Aug 91 view metadata download record
504 (D) 1465 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 17 Jan 91 view metadata download record
504 (D) 1790 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 27 Jul 90 view metadata download record
505 (E) 1403 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 12 Apr 91 view metadata download record
505 (E) 1722 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 22 Aug 91 view metadata download record
505 (E) 2046 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 22 Aug 91 view metadata download record
506 (F) 1903 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 03 Aug 90 view metadata download record
506 (F) 2225 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 24 Aug 91 view metadata download record
507 (G) 1975 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 12 Jun 91 view metadata download record
507 (G) 2296 meters Aanderaa RCM5 15 Jul 90 - 17 Aug 91 view metadata download record

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Brief Description

This experiment was designed to measure the intermittant flow of cold, dense bottom water southwestward from the Norwegian Sea, across the Iceland-Faroe Ridge and into the North Atlantic, where it becomes a component of the North Atlantic Deep Water.

Seven moorings were placed in a line running southeastward from the edge of the Iceland shelf, approximately 300 km downstream from the crest of the Iceland-Faroe Ridge ( see map). Every mooring contained an Aanderaa RCM8 positioned 10 meters above the seafloor. Four of the seven moorings contained an additional instrument about 300 meters above the seafloor, and two of those four moorings contained a third instrument placed about 600 meters above the bottom. In all, there were thirteen current meters.

The moorings were installed in July 1990 and recovered in March 1992, but the current meters exhausted their capacity after 13 months. Eight of the instruments functioned for the full 13 months; one failed after 11 months, another after about 9 months and another after 6 months. Two meters provided only about 2 weeks" worth of data.

Related publications

Saunders, P.M. (1990): Cold outflow from the Faeroe Bank Channel. J. Phys. Oceanog., 20(1), 29-43.

Saunders, P.M. and B.A. King (1995): Oceanic fluxes on the WOCE A11 section. J. Phys. Oceanog., 25(9), 1942-1958.

Saunders, P.M. (1996): The flux of dense cold overflow water southeast of Iceland. J. Phys. Oceanog., 26(1), 85-95.

Saunders, P.M. (2001): The dense northern overflows. In Ocean Circulation and Climate: Observing and Modelling the Global Ocean, pp. 401-417. Academic Press, San Diego.

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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.

You should know 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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