Brief description of ACM9

During 1994 - 1996 a two-year experimental program aimed at bringing new elements to the study of the water exchange at the Strait of Gibraltar was conducted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Spanish Instituto Hidrografico de la Marina. The core of the program consisted of continuous vertical profile measurements using an upward-looking, bottom-mounted ADCP at the strait's mid-sill position. Four consecutive 6-month deployments were made at the site, beginning in October 1994 and ending in September 1996.

The goal of the experiment was to determine seasonal and interannual variability in the exchange flows, and to compare these results with flow observations made 10 years earlier during the GIBEX 85-86 Experiment (Kinder and Bryden, 1987. The 1985-1986 Gibraltar Experiment. EOS, 68, 786-787 and 793-795).

ACM9 was a precursor to a larger experiment sponsored by the European Commission under the title CANIGO in the Straits of Gibraltar. The latter experiment involved moorings, hydrography and ship-mounted ADCPs. The Irish Marine Data Centre is producing a data CD for the experiment.

Related publications

Bryden, H.L., J. Candela and T.H. Kinder (1994): Exchange through the Strait of Gibraltar. Progress in Oceanography, 33(3), 201-248.

Astraldi, M., S. Balopoulos, J. Candela, M. Gacic, G.P. Gasparini, B. Manca and A. Teocharis (1999): The role of straits and channels in understanding the characterisitcs of the Mediterranean circulation. Progress in Oceanography, 44 (1-3), 65-108.

Candela, J. (2001): Mediterranean Water and Global Circulation. In: Ocean Circulation and Climate. Observing and modelling the global ocean, Eds. G. Siedler, J. Church and J.Gould. Academic Press, 900 pp.

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.