Southern Ocean GLOBEC moored array and automated weather station data report

Abstract

As part of the U.S. Southern Ocean GLOBEC program, moored time series measurements of temperature, conductivity (salinity), pressure, velocity, and acoustic backscatter were made from March 2001 to March 2003 in and near Marguerite Bay, located on the Antarctic Peninsula western shelf. To monitor surface forcing during the moored array observations, two automatic weather stations (AWSs) were deployed on islands in Marguerite Bay and time series of wind, air temperature, pressure, and relative humidity were collected from May 2001 through March 2003. This report describes the individual moorings, their locations and local bathymetry, the instrumentation used and measurement depths, calibration and data processing steps taken to produce final time series, and basic plots of the final time series. The AWS data acquisition and processing are also described and basic plots of the final meteorological time series presented. Directions are given about how to access the raw and processed moored and AWS data via the SO GLOBEC website

Ocean circulation and dynamics on the west Antarctic Peninsula continental shelf

“…The observed M 2 tide current magnitude is overestimated by the This translates into an error of 2 to 4 minutes, which is in general larger than the clock drifts found upon instrument recovery, although a few instruments were found to have clock errors of a few minutes over the 1-year deployment (Moffat et al, 2005).…”

“…The following is a brief description of the data sets used in this thesis. The moored array, automatic weather stations and the bathymetric survey information presented here were mostly extracted from the Southern Ocean GLOBEC moored array and automated weather station data report (Moffat et al, 2005), where a more detailed description is given.…”

“…The basic instrumentation used in the moored array is listed in Table 2.2. Details on the quality control tests and corrections of the data can be found in (Moffat et al, 2005).…”

“…In order to calculate the average quantities, the velocity and pressure anomaly are assumed constant from the shallower (deepest) instrument in the water column to the surface (bottom). Several of the ADCP records in the top 50 m or so have long periods of time (in particular during the winter) with no data, and B2 and B3 had a few instruments change depth due to loss of buoyancy of their top instrument (B2) and flotation sphere (B3) (Moffat et al, 2005). The vertical averages were therefore computed using a subset of the data that provided measurements throughout the entire deployment and, in the case of the ADCP records, had at least 90% of data return during that period.…”

“…Ice thickness data were also obtained at a series of ice stations during the winter cruise (Perovich et al, 2004), and throughout the SO GLOBEC mooring deployment (March 2001to February 2002 at the A2 mooring (Figure 5-1 and Table 5.1), which was equipped with an Ice Profiling Sonar (IPS) deployed at the top of the mooring line. The IPS measured the acoustic range to the surface (the sea surface or ice bottom when present) every two seconds, which was then converted to distance (and thus, ice draft) using in situ sound speed and density calculated from a nearby sensor (Moffat et al, 2005). All mooring time series data shown here were low-pass filtered using a 33-hr half-amplitude filter (Flagg et al, 1976;Limeburner et al, 1983) to remove tidal and inertial band variability.…”