What's new in the Deep Water Archive
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26 January 2012
During 1982, 1983 and 1984 the USGS placed a number of moorings over the continetal shelf and slope southeast of Cape Cod. We have taken 25 current records from the slope moorings and included them in this database. You can access them here or by searching here on the experiment name "USGS Shelf/Slope Study".
27 December 2011
The database now contains 15 VACM and VTCT records from the Montery Canyon Project of the US Geological Survey. These measurements originally were made with a time increment of 15 minutes. The versions here have been filtered and are hourly. You can download them here or by doing a detailed search here on "Montery Canyon Project".
2 December 2011
We have added 25 additional current meter records to the existing Deep Water Dump Site 106 collection. You can download them here. You can also reach them by searching here on experiment name. The moorings were on the continental slope southeast of Long Island
23 November 2011
Six current meter records from two moorings on Karin Ridge have been placed in the Deep Water Archive. This site is in the central Pacific southwest of Hawaii. You can reach the data here or by searching on the experiment name Karin Ridge or the PI name M.Noble here.
19 November 2011
We have added bin records from two long ADCP deployments in the TOGA/EPOCS/TAO series of experiments. Each is about 5 years in length and was pieced together at PMEL from shorter deployments mostly about a year long. We have discarded bins that were too noisy to be useful and have used predictive interpolations to bridge the gaps between the year-long deployments. The gaps all were shorter than 36 hours.
The new records are from the equatorial sites at 110 West and 140 West. We do have in hand long records from some of the other equatorial sites but have decided not to include them here because of quality problems.
You can access these data here or by searching here on the experiment name EPOCS. (Note that for convenience we have gathered a number of related experiments on and near the Pacific equator uner the common title EPOCS, which stands for Equatorial Pacific Ocean Current Studies.)
20 October 2011
The Deep Water Database now contains 60 current meter records from the Ocean Margin Exchange Project (OMEX), which was a multidisciplinary effort to study the physical, chemical and biological processes at the ocean margin of the Northwest European continental shelf. You can reach these records here or with a detailed search on the experiment name OMEX. OMEX began in 1993 and concluded in 1999.
We note parenthetically that BODC has made a great deal of information from this experiment available in a set of CDs. The 60 files included here are available in that set, in plain text - which we were able to read and translate to our prefered format. Other files appear to have a nonstandard netCDF format. We were able to open these files with Unidata's ncdump program but found insufficient global information in them to render them useful. These files appear to be inaccessible to anyone who cannot install a Microsoft database and other Microsoft software available on the BODC disk set; as a Unix and Linux shop we were unable to do so.
25 August 2011
The Peru Currents Study produced 83 current meter records. It was undertaken during the 1980s by the OSU Buoy Group as part of a series of investigations into eastern boundary upwelling regimes. Although some of the time series do not meet the criteria for inclusion in this database (they are too short or in shallow water) we have included all of them, for the sake of completeness. You can reach them here or by doing a detailed search on "Peru Currents Study" or "R.L.Smith".
20 July 2011
Six year-long VACM records from three moorings that were placed over a mid-Atlantic seamount have been added here. These were WHOI moorings 633, 634, and 635, installed in November 1977 and recovered in December 1978.
13 July 2011
We have added 9 new current meter records to the 1993 portion of the Vents archive, which is here. The Vents experiments measured deep currents in the vicinity of seafloor volcanic vents in the northeast Pacific. With this addition, there are 205 current meter records from Vents in this archive.
10 July 2011
The database now contains 27 current records from the Arabian Sea Mixed Layer Dynamics Experiment. This experiment took place during 1994-95 in deep water southeast of Oman. Most of the records are about a year in length. You can reach the data here or by doing a search on Arabian Sea Experiment.
16 June 2011
7 VACM records from POLYMODE have been added to this table, and 11 other VACM records have been added here near the top of the table (they are from WHOI moorings 616 through 620). The latter group may also be from POLYMODE but we haven't any definite information on that score.
2 June 2011
The latest addition to this database consists of 52 current meter records from the MASAR experiment, which took place over the continental slope and rise off the US mid-Atlantic coast. These records were made by SAIC under contract from the US Mineral Management Service. The quality of the data set is somewhat mixed, but we have improved it as well as we could by (1) removing useless records or portions of records, (2) replacing some linear interpolations with predictive interpolations, and (3) removing obvious error spikes. The MASAR data is here.
29 April 2011
Today's addition to the database consists of 38 VACM records from WHOI's SYNOP 1 experiment. These moorings were in the water for about 2 years with a goal of learning enough about the dynamics of the Gulf Stream to make useful predictions possible. You can access the records here or by doing a search on SYNOP 1 or the names of the experiment's principal investigators (S.Worrilow and N.G.Hogg).
16 April 2011
We have added 7 current meter records from the Greenland Sea Project. (The database already contained 14 current records from this experiment.) The new records were made in the 1989-1990 season. You can reach them here.
6 April 2011
The database now contains the records from MMS/SAIC's Desoto Canyon Eddy Intrusion Study that were promised below. Again, we have excluded some records that were too short or of dubious quality. But most of the current records are here and are quite clean. You can reach them here. You will notice that most of the moorings are over the Continental Shelf, a region that we have intentionally excluded from this database. But because of the paucity of data available from the Gulf of Mexico we felt it best to include the entire array, even though only three of the moorings are from deep water.
28 December 2010
This addition to the Deep Water Archive may be useful to those interested in the BP oil spill. We have just added 218 current records from the MMS/SAIC Desoto Canyon Extension experiment. Some 183 of them are bin records from moored ADCPs and the rest are from various single-depth instruments. We excluded a number of temperature, salinity, and pressure records because of questions caused by a problematical filter that SAIC used to reduce spikiness, but we believe that the 218 records we included are clean and useful. You can access these records here.
In the not-too-distant future we will add some data from the MMS/SAIC Desoto Canyon Eddy Intrusion Study, which took place along the Shelf and Slope to the East of Desoto Canyon Extension moorings.
24 November 2010
34 additional current meter records from the MMS/SAIC Gulf of Mexico Physical Oceanography Project are now in the database. These records are from the Eastern side of the basin. (Some 44 records from the Western side already are present.) You can reach all of them here.
28 October 2010
Twelve additional current meter records from TOGA/EPOCS have been placed in the database here. These records were made on the Equator at 140 degrees West in 1987 and 1988.
23 October 2010
We have just added our first current meter records from the Gulf of Mexico. These 44 records were taken by SAIC during 1985 - 1988 as part of the US Minerals Management Service's Gulf of Mexico Physical Oceanography Program (GMPO). You can reach the data here.
9 September 2010
11 current meter records and 5 MicroCat records from the Southern Ocean have been added to the database here. These data were collected between 30 October 1997 and 16 March 1998 by an Oregon State University group with some support from the JGOFS Project.
2 August 2010
20 current meter records from EPOCS (Equatorial Pacific Ocean Climate Study) have been added to the database here. The records are from five moorings deployed on the Equator at about 110 degrees West during 1980 - 1982.
27 July 2010
The main moorings of the SEQUAL experiment ("Seasonal Response of the Equatorial Atlantic") were deployed in 1983, 1984, and 1985; but a smaller pilot project ran from February through November of 1981. We have just added 15 current meter records from that pilot project (designated "pre-SEQUAL") to the database. You can access all of the SEQUAL and pre-SEQUAL current records here.
25 July 2010
Today's addition to the database consists of 14 VACM records from the 1977-78 follow-on to GATE (GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment). The moorings were set by a US-French group on or near the equator in the Gulf of Guinea. The data are here.
27 June 2010
We have added a number of Aanderaa, SeaBird, and ADCP records from the 2006-08 mooring of the North Pole Environmental Observatory (NPEO). You can find these data here or by searching on the experiment name NPEO here.
29 May 2010
The latest addition to the database consists of 89 year-long records from the US Southern Ocean GLOBEC project (SOGLOBEC). These include data from VACMs and various SeaBird temperature, pressure, and conductivity recorders. You can access SOGLOBEC here or by searching for SOGLOBEC in the detailed search portion of this website.
26 April 2010
The database now includes a number of current records from RAMA, which was a companion experiment to TOGA and PIRATA. RAMA took place in the equatorial Indian Ocean (hence the name). You can reach these records quickly here, or by searching for RAMA in the detailed search portion of this website.
10 April 2010
We have included current meter records from the PIRATA experiment. PIRATA was a multi-year effort during 2000 - 2009 in the equatorial Atlantic. The files contain speed, direction, u, and v. You can download these data here or do a detailed search on PIRATA. All of the records have a time increment of one hour. (The original 10 and 20 minute VACM and VMCM records have been filtered and subsampled. We used a 12 hour wide Cosine-Lanczos filter with a passband of 0 to 6 cycles/day.)
26 February 2010
The latest addition to the Current Meter Database comprises 10 records made off Evans Head on the Northeast coast of Australia. These records, which were made in 1989, have been placed here, where they can be considered along with some current meter records made along the same coast some six years earlier.
21 January 2010
Nine current meter records from SAZ97-98 have been added to the database. They are from a CSIRO experiment in the same general area as WOCE component SCM3, during the two years following SCM3. You can reach these records here or by searching here with the experiment name SAZ97-98. (SAZ stands for Sub-Antarctic Zone.)
One might wonder why we include here data from CSIRO, when that data is readily available to anyone through CSIRO's Data Trawler website. There are at least a couple of reasons. First, it is nice to have a very broad (i.e., world wide) selection of deep water current meter data available at a single site - which is our mandate here. But second, and perhaps more important, the format in which the Data trawler makes records available is anything but user-friendly. Not to put too fine a point on it, the format is extremely difficult to work with. We think our own stranger format, on the other hand, is about as simple and easy a format as any we have seen. We believe that the format in which data is archived should not be a stumbling block to its use.
5 January 2010
We have made some changes to the database software. First, the error messages you get during a "detailed search" (hopefully there will be none) are more attractive and in some cases more informative.
Second, the form you fill out to define a geographic region to search is more useful. The old form allowed you only to choose among a number of predefined areas, such as "North Pacific" or "Equatorial Atlantic". And even then, as we have noticed, it did not capture all the mooring sites it should have. The search algorithm, which dated from the very early years of the WWW, was not very good.
This algorithm has been replaced by one that is much better, that we think will find all the moorings it should. Gone are the predefined regions; instead you will define an arbitrary region by entering its minimum and maximum latitudes, and its minimum and maximum longitudes.
30 November 2009
The NC Field experiment occupied 15 mooring sites in the Gulf Stream off Cape Hatteras. Currents were recorded over the continental shelf and slope during many short consecutive deployments over a two-year period from February 1992 through February 1994. Gaps between deployments varied from a few hours to a few days. You can reach these data here or by searching here with the experiment name NC Field. We have where possible joined these records by bridging the short gaps between them with linear and predictive interpolations.
13 August 2009
The database now contains 12 Aanderaa RCM4 records from the Gulf of Alaska Recirculation Study (GARS) conducted by the University of Alaska in 1986 - 88. You can access them here.
29 June 2009
We have added 5 new files to Vents 94 and have cleared up some confusion by removing a file that had mistakenly been included in Vents 94. (It belongs in Vents 95 and a copy has, in fact, been there all along.)
1 May 2009
The database now contains current meter and Seacat SBE records from the 4th year of the University of Washington's North Pole Environmental Observatory (NPEO). You can access them here.
8 February 2009
We have just added 89 current meter records from WOCE component SCM2 to the Quick Search portion of the database. You can find them here in the last two tables of the Quick Search results. This makes a total of 203 records from SCM2 in the database. (Actually, these 89 additional records have long been available here via the Detailed Search, but for some reason we forgot to include them in the Quick Search.)
31 December 2008
The AWI Arctic collection now contains 7 thermistor chain records from moorings in the Greenland Sea.
26 December 2008
21 current meter records have been added to the AWI Arctic collection, making 78 in all for that group. We suspect that some of these records were taken during named experiments (such as the Greenland Sea Project) but do not have enough information to identify them as such. Gerd Rohardt is given here as the Principal Investigator for all of these records because he is so designated in AWI's own archive where the records also reside. We do not know whether that identification is accurate.
23 December 2008
We have added 5 current meter records from 2 moorings in PMEL's Greenland Sea Project. That makes a total of 15 records from that project. You can find them here.
17 December 2008
You will find a new page here that contains 57 current meter records obtained by the Alfred Wegener Institute in the Arctic Ocean. Several of these records have been in the "Miscellaneous Atlantic" portion of the database for some time, but we have moved them to the Arctic Ocean section - which is more appropriate since the moorings were north of the Arctic Circle. You can also reach these records by doing a search on "AWI Arctic moorings".
21 November 2008
We have added 24 current records collected during various expeditions of the Alfred Wegener Institute. Five of the moorings lie in a line along latitude 75 South, in the Weddell Sea. The remaining records are from elsewhere in the Weddell Sea. You can reach them here, or by doing a search on "AWI Antarctic moorings".
11 November 2008
19 current meter records from T.J.Muller's ESTOC experiment have been added to the database. You can reach them here. The records are from a mooring north of the Canary Islands that was occupied during three successive years (September 1994 through September 1997).
4 November 2008
Rejoice! America's long dark night is almost over.
3 October 2008
A few new current meter records have been added to the database, all of them obtained from CSIRO. Seven are from within the Indonesian archipelago: three from a single mooring in the Halmahera Sea, and four from a mooring in Maluku Strait (AKA Molucca Sea). These seven records have been grouped together here.
We also have two current meter records from a mooring near Heard Island, which lies on the Kerguelen Plateau in the south-central Indian Ocean. To access these records, do a search on the experiment name "Heard Island" here.
28 June 2008
We have just added 74 records from the North Pole Environmetal Observatory of the University of Washington. These include records from Aanderaa current meters, Seabird TPC recorders, and RDI ADCPs. They are from moorings placed very close to the north pole during 3 succesive years (2001-02, 2002-03, and 2003-04). You can access these data here.
7 May 2008
The database now contains 22 current meter and SBE records from moorings deployed along the Lomonosov Ridge as part of the High Latitude Dynamics project. You can reach them here. This is our second data set from High Latitude Dynamics; the other consists of records from the Beaufort Sea.
23 April 2008
We have just added to the database 48 current meter records made along the Equator between longitude 76 East and 93 East. These records were made by the mooring team of the Indian National Institute of Oceanography, as part of Ocean Observing System (OOS) program of the Indian Department of Ocean Development. You can reach the data here or by doing a search on EQCM (the experiment name) or V.S.N.Murty (the name of the PI).
4 March 2008
For some time the database has contained a number of current meter records from PMEL's VENTS experiment. This portion of the VENTS program took place in the northeast Pacific near several undersea volcanic vents, and was an attempt to map the outflow plumes of the vents. Today we have added 57 VENTS current meter records to the existing collection in our database. The new records are from 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998. You can access them here.
9 February 2008
We have added 18 current meter records to the DOMES collection. DOMES stands for "Deep Ocean Mining and Environmental Study" and was conducted by NOAA during 1975 - 1977 to determine possible effects of mining manganese nodules on the seafloor. Most of the 18 records are only 2 months in length but complement the 4 longer records that our archive has contained for some years. You can reach DOMES here. Also, we have fixed some depth errors in the 4 previous records.
2 February 2008
The database now contains 33 current meter and TSR records from the Beaufort Sea. They were made during a phase of the High Latitude Dynamics experiment, and are our first dataset from the Arctic Ocean. You can reach them here or here.
13 January 2008
Two more components of ACE 83 have been added to the database, CSIRO's Cape Howe and Newcastle sections - 23 Aanderaa current meter records in all. To reach them, use the links in the 31 December entry immediately below. We are aware of two additional short sections that were part of ACE 83, but since they occurred entirely in relatively shallow water over the continental shelf we have not included them here.
Most of the unfiltered ACE 83 current meter records, as we received them from CSIRO, contained time series described as pressure. Unfortunately we were unable to determine the units of the pressure measurements and have not included them here.
31 December 2007
Fifteen Aanderaa current meter records have just been added to our ACE 83 collection. ACE stands for Australian Coastal Experiment; it took place in 1983-84 off Australia's east coast. The new records are from CSIRO's Stanwell Park component of the experiment (and are new only in the sense that they are new to the Buoy Group database.) You can access them here or by searching on the experiment name "Australian Coastal Experiment". Most of the records are about 6 months in length.
28 November 2007
Eight Aanderaa current meter records taken by CSIRO over the Lord Howe Rise during 1989 - 1990 are available. The records are seven+ months in length and are from two moorings. You can reach them here or by doing a search on the experiment name "Lord Howe Rise 89". Lord Howe Rise is situated in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.
17 September 2007
The last moorings of the AnSlope (Antarctic Slope) experiment have been out of the water for more than two years, and we are now able to include here all of the mooring data - including the current meter and Seacat time series. You can access these data here or by doing a search on the experiment name Anslope.
12 September 2007
We have added 12 year-long current meter records from Makassar Strait to the database. These records were obtained by CSIRO during 1993 - 1994. You may be interested in comparing them with curent records taken somewhat farther south in the Strait during the Arlindo experiment. Click here to access the CSIRO data and here to access the Arlindo data.
2 September 2007
The database now contains 4 current meter records from Deep Water Dump Site 106. This location, on the Continetal Slope 106 miles SE of New York City, was used for dumping of sewage sludge from 1986 through 1992. Two current meter moorings were installed by the USGS in order to understand the transport and effects of sludge at the site. Go here to access the data.
25 August 2007
We have just added 26 year-long records from the Labrador Sea to the database. Most of the 26 are from SBE Seacats and two types of current meter. We have included them here under the rubric "Labrador Deep Convection". They were extracted from a group of CDF files provided by Friedrich Schott of IFM Kiel. (These files also contained data from doppler profilers. The doppler records lacked information on bin depths, so we were not able to include them here.) You can access the 26 records that we did include here or by doing a search on the experiment name "Labrador Deep Convection".
29 July 2007
The pressure records from Tom Whitworth's Antarctic Circumpolar Current Choke Point Pressure Monitoring program are now available here to a precision of 0.001 decibar. Initially we had provided only 0.1 db precison, which is not fine enough for many purposes. (Thanks to Richard Ray for pointing this out.) The original pressure records, as uploaded from the Seacat CTDs had a precision of 0.001 db, and the records on this website now have the full precision.
10 December 2006
Not only is it the 71st birthday of the webmaster, who still breathes, but he has added a number of current records from the Gulf of Alaska to the database. The records are from several experiments but are subsumed under PMEL's rubric FOCI, which stands for Fisheries-Oceanography Cordinated Investigations. You can reach this latest addition here or by doing a search on the experiment name FOCI.
28 October 2006
We have added 9 Aanderaa current records from three moorings off the northeast coast of Greenland. We are unsure of the experiment name, so have placed them in the Miscellaneous Atlantic category. You can identify them there by their position (approximately 72 degrees North, 8 degrees West) and dates (June 1987 to June 1988). The mooring names are GS-1, GS-2, and GS-3.
13 October 2006
93 current meter records from the SEQUAL experiment have been added to the database. You can access them here. SEQUAL (which stands for "Seasonal Response of the Equatorial Atlantic") was a joint effort of WHOI and IFREMER during 1983 - 1985. These data are of exceptionally good quality.
The database now contains more than 5000 records from deep sea moorings. Most were made by current meters but the archive also includes time series from temperature recorders, Seacat TPC recorders, pressure recorders, etc.
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21 September 2006
Throughout its history the OSU Buoy Group implemented a policy of publishing a data report after each experiment, as soon as the data had been processed. During the Buoy Group's final years these data reports, which contained mooring descriptions, data statistics and plots, were published electronically on the Group's website. That portion of the website has now been fully implemented here. It includes seven data reports, including the Buoy Group's most recent (and final) experiment, AnSlope. Since the data reports contain more information about each experiment than can be found elsewhere in this archive, you may wish to look there first. All of the data reports contain downloadable copies of the data files (the time series).
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9 September 2006
We have just placed here some of the mooring data from AnSlope. AnSlope (Antarctic Slope) was a 2-year experiment beginning in 2003. Its goal was to examine and quantify water that sinks at high southern latitudes and flows down the Antarctic slope to contribute to northward-moving deep water masses. Numerous moorings contained current meters and SBE Seacats. Year-long moorings were set in March 2003 and again in March 2004. We have included here brief descriptions of the moored instruments including statistics from the time series. The time series themselves have not yet been released to the public domain and probably will not be available for another year.
UPDATE 17 September 2007: The time series (current meter records, SBE Seacat records, etc.) are now available on this website for download.
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31 August 2006
12 new current meter records from the Vents experiment have been added to the database. Vents is a multidisciplinary examination of the region surrounding a number of hot seafloor vents in the Northeast Pacific. The new files were recorded in 1999, 2000, and 2001.
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24 April 2006
We have just added new data from the Abrupt Topography experiment to the website. These data are from the ADCP that was deployed at Mooring R2 on the flank of Fieberling Guyot. This instrument recorded velocities from 47 bins, each of which was 4 meters in vertical extent. The top two bins were of poor quality and have not been included here.
At this point the database contains records from Mooring C which was at the top of the seamount, from B2 and B3 which were in deep water northwest of the seamount, and from R2. We do NOT have any data from at least 5 other moorings known to have been deployed - F2, F3, F4, F5 and R3. If you have these data or know where they can be obtained please contact webmaster[at]cmrecords[dot]net so that they can be added to this database. (Please note that our email address has been obfuscated to foil spammers.)
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2 September 2005
The deep water archive was maintained for several years by the OSU Buoy Group. However,the Buoy Group has disbanded and no longer exists. Several of its members have retired and others have moved on.
We believe that by making available a large world-wide collection current meter records from deep-water moorings we have provided a useful service to the research and educational community. We are aware of no other large, historical, searchable, high quality collection of downloadable current records on the web. We would like to continue making these data available.
To this end, when it became clear that we would not be able to maintain the database indefinitely at Oregon State University, we made arrangements to mirror this collection at the present site, which we expect to remain on the web for the long term. Thus although the Deep Water Archive can still be found at kepler.coas.oregonstate.edu and http://cmdac.oce.orst.edu those URLs may not be maintained for the long term. The archive's long term address is now
which has two aliases: www.currentrecords.net and www.currentmeterrecords.net.
We intend to continue adding new current records as we acquire them. If you have any current meter records (including ADCP records) that are from deep water (i.e., beyond the continental shelves) and 6 months or more in length that you would like to include, please contact us.
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