Brief description of SCM4

The objectives of this experiment were

• To deploy moored current meters in the passage between Cape Mentelle and Broken Plateau, to measure the flow of Deep and Bottom Water into the West Australian Basin.
• To use the moored current meter data together with several realisations of the hydrography across the section to deduce the flow of Bottom, Deep and Intermediate Waters in this region.
• To estimate the vertical diffusivity across potential temperature surfaces with values less than 1.1 deg C in the West Australian Basin, using the deduced flow rates of Deep and Bottom Water across a section extending from Naturaliste Plateau to Broken Ridge.
• To contribute to an estimate of the poleward heat flux borne by the Indian Ocean by obtaining more reliable estimates of the equatorward flow of Deep and Bottom Water into the West Australian Basin.

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.