Description of WOCE component PCM2

The Eastern Boundary Current study was a cooperative venture involving several West Coast and East Coast laboratories. The first EBC current meter moorings were installed in June 1992 by Oregon State University and the Naval Postgraduate School. These moorings were replaced in May 1993 and recovered in June 1994, ending this portion of EBC. The OSU/NPGS array was centered over the Northern California Slope at about 37.7N, 124.0W.

Two additional arrays were deployed in July and August 1992 and recovered in August 1994. One of these, an inshore array positioned over the continental slope just north of the OSU/NPGS moorings, produced 20 VACM recordings. It was installed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The other, an offshore array in deeper water to the west, was installed by the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science; it contained both VACMs and Aanderaa current meters and produced 24 current records.

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.