PCM3 (East Australia Current)

This experiment produced 41 current meter records from 12 moorings. You can view metadata and download the records by clicking on links in the tables below. Each current meter record is identified in the tables by its depth and the name of the mooring. A brief description of the experiment is available, and you can download a data report in PDF format. You may want to look at a map of the array 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.

If you are interested in low-pass filtered versions of these current records you can click here to download a compressed archive that contains them all.

November 1991 - September 1992

mooringinstr depthinstr typedatesmetadatadownload
Tas911 30 meters Aanderaa RCM4S 16 Nov 91 - 27 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas911 50 meters Aanderaa RCM8 16 Nov 91 - 10 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas912 50 meters Aanderaa RCM8 17 Nov 91 - 26 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas912 150 meters Aanderaa RCM4 17 Nov 91 - 26 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas913 50 meters Aanderaa RCM4 17 Nov 91 - 27 May 92 view metadata download record
Tas913 150 meters Aanderaa RCM4 17 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas913 250 meters Aanderaa RCM4 17 Nov 91 - 04 Jan 92 view metadata download record
Tas913 400 meters Aanderaa RCM5S 17 Nov 91 - 28 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas913 600 meters Aanderaa RCM5 17 Nov 91 - 27 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas914 371 meters Aanderaa RCM5 17 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas914 651 meters Aanderaa RCM5 17 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas914 1051 meters Aanderaa RCM5 17 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas914 1551 meters Aanderaa RCM5 17 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas915 320 meters Aanderaa RCM5 18 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas915 600 meters Aanderaa RCM5 18 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas915 1000 meters Aanderaa RCM5 18 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas915 1500 meters Aanderaa RCM5S 18 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas915 2500 meters Aanderaa RCM8 18 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas915 3500 meters Aanderaa RCM8 18 Nov 91 - 22 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas916 325 meters Aanderaa RCM5 18 Nov 91 - 24 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas916 605 meters Aanderaa RCM5S 18 Nov 91 - 24 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas916 1005 meters Aanderaa RCM5 18 Nov 91 - 14 Feb 92 view metadata download record
Tas916 1505 meters Aanderaa RCM5 18 Nov 91 - 24 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas916 2505 meters Aanderaa RCM5S 18 Nov 91 - 24 Sep 92 view metadata download record
Tas916 3505 meters Aanderaa RCM8 18 Nov 91 - 24 Sep 92 view metadata download record

September 1992 - November 1993

mooringinstr depthinstr typedatesmetadatadownload
Tas921 50 meters Aanderaa RCM4 29 Sep 92 - 14 Sep 93 view metadata download record
Tas922 50 meters Aanderaa RCM4 29 Sep 92 - 29 Dec 92 view metadata download record
Tas922 150 meters Aanderaa RCM4 29 Sep 92 - 29 Sep 93 view metadata download record
Tas923 250 meters Aanderaa RCM5 29 Sep 92 - 06 Oct 93 view metadata download record
Tas923 400 meters Aanderaa RCM5 29 Sep 92 - 03 Feb 93 view metadata download record
Tas923 600 meters Aanderaa RCM5 29 Sep 92 - 23 Nov 93 view metadata download record
Tas924 650 meters Aanderaa RCM5 27 Sep 92 - 03 Nov 93 view metadata download record
Tas924 1000 meters Aanderaa RCM5 27 Sep 92 - 15 Oct 93 view metadata download record
Tas924 1500 meters Aanderaa RCM5 28 Sep 92 - 17 Oct 93 view metadata download record
Tas925 600 meters Aanderaa RCM5 27 Sep 92 - 26 Oct 93 view metadata download record
Tas926 300 meters Aanderaa RCM5 26 Sep 92 - 05 Nov 93 view metadata download record
Tas926 600 meters Aanderaa RCM5 26 Sep 92 - 07 Nov 93 view metadata download record
Tas926 1000 meters Aanderaa RCM5 10 Dec 92 - 14 Nov 93 view metadata download record
Tas926 1500 meters Aanderaa RCM5 26 Sep 92 - 16 Nov 93 view metadata download record
Tas926 2500 meters Aanderaa RCM8 26 Sep 92 - 18 Sep 93 view metadata download record
Tas926 3500 meters Aanderaa RCM8 26 Sep 92 - 23 Aug 93 view metadata download record

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Description of WOCE component PCM3

The East Australia Current is the western boundary current of the South Pacific subtropical gyre and is an important element of the heat tranport of the Pacific basin. PCM3 is part of an array of WOCE measurements aimed at determining the Pacific ocean heat transport at 30S, which includes the current meter array PCM9 and the hydrographic line P6.

The PCM3 array (see map) was designed with the aim of measuring the full depth transport and structure of the East Australia Current for a period of two years. The array was deployed in November 1991, serviced in September 1992 and recovered in March 1994. The longest records are 22 months in length. The moorings were located at 30°S and spanned the Australian shelf break and slope out to 154°30"S. They were set in water depths of 95, 200, 700, 2050, 4400 and 4500m. Aanderaa meter depths were nominally 30, 50, 150, 250, 300, 400, 600, 1000, 1500, 2500 and 3500m. Data return was fair from the first deployment and poor from the second. Large mooring knockdowns punctuate the records taken over the abyssal slope.

Upward-looking ADCPs covering the upper 300 meters of the water column were present on the 2050m and 4400m moorings. The ADCPs on the 4400m mooring failed, but those on the 2050m mooring returned good data. (The ADCP data were not supplied to CMDAC and are not present here.)

A PCM3 data report is available in PDF format. See also

Chiswell, S.M., J. Toole and J. Church (1997): Transports across the Tasman Sea from WOCE repeat sections: the East Australian Current 1990-94. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 31(4), 469-475.

Mata, M.M., M. Tonczak, S. Wijffels and J. Church (1998): East Australian Current volume transports from the PCM3 array. International WOCE Newsletter, 32, 18-19.

Mata, M.M. and M. Tomczak (2000): East Australian Current volume transports at 30S: estimates from the World Ocean Circulation Experiment hydrographic sections PR11/P6 and PCM3 current meter array. J. Geophys. Res., 105(C12), 28509-28526.

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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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