PCM11 (Samoan Passage Experiment) This experiment produced 26 current meter records from 6 moorings. You can view metadata and download the records by clicking on links in the table below. A brief description of the experiment also is available. Each current meter record is identified in the table by its depth and the name of the mooring. You may want to look at a map of the array first 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. Mooring Meter Depth metadata download Samoa 1 2990 meters view metadata download record Samoa 1 3980 meters view metadata download record Samoa 1 4230 meters view metadata download record Samoa 2 4340 meters view metadata download record Samoa 2 4640 meters view metadata download record Samoa 2 4890 meters view metadata download record Samoa 3 2890 meters view metadata download record Samoa 3 3940 meters view metadata download record Samoa 3 4350 meters view metadata download record Samoa 3 4650 meters view metadata download record Samoa 3 4900 meters view metadata download record Samoa 3 5100 meters view metadata download record Samoa 4 3970 meters view metadata download record Samoa 4 4330 meters view metadata download record Samoa 4 4650 meters view metadata download record Samoa 4 4900 meters view metadata download record Samoa 4 5100 meters view metadata download record Samoa 5 3980 meters view metadata download record Samoa 5 4330 meters view metadata download record Samoa 5 4630 meters view metadata download record Samoa 5 4880 meters view metadata download record Samoa 5 5080 meters view metadata download record Samoa 6 2970 meters view metadata download record Samoa 6 3940 meters view metadata download record Samoa 6 4160 meters view metadata download record Samoa 6 4360 meters view metadata download record Return to top of page. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Description of WOCE component PCM11 The Samoan Passage experiment was designed to determine the northward transport of abyssal water through the Samoan Passage (10S, 170W). This topographic constriction forms the major connection for deep interbasin flow between hemispheres in the Pacific. Here we present current meter data from the six subsurface moorings deployed in the Passage during September 1992 and recovered in February 1994. The six moorings were placed along a transect of the Passage (see map). A total of 27 Aanderaa RCM8 current meters were employed, each measuring horizontal current and temperature, with the upper two meters on each mooring also measuring pressure. All instruments were recovered. There were some failures: * Instrument 5872, the top meter of Mooring 2, experienced an electronic board failure after 5 days and stopped recording data. The data from this meter are not presented here. * The pressure sensor on Instrument 4412 (2990 m on Mooring 1) showed abrupt depth changes several times. We believe these to be spurious, due to a sensor failure. * The temperature sensor of Instrument 5856 (2970 m on Mooring 6) malfunctioned after 9 months. * The compass of Instrument 7769 (4900 m on Mooring 3) failed its post-cruise calibration. It appears that the failure occured approximately one-fourth of the way through the experiment. Because the data are vector averages, both speed and direction are suspect. The quality of the remaining records was excellent. The experiment's PIs were R.D.Pillsbury of Oregon State University and Daniel L. Rudnick of University of Washington. Return to top of page. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Format of the current records These files have been compressed with the ZIP compression utility. After downloading them from the disk, 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. Return to top of page. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------