SOFAR float Mediterranean outflow experiment : summary and data from 1986-88

Abstract

In October, 1984, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution SOFAR float group began a three and a half year field program to measure the velocity field of the Mediterranean water in the eastern North Atlantic. The principal scientific goal was to learn how the Mediterranean salt tongue is produced by the general circulation and the eddy diffusion of the Canary Basin. Thirty-two floats were launched at depths near 1100 m: 14 in a cluster centered on 32°N, 24°W, with nearest neighbors at 20 km spacing, 10 at much wider spacing to explore regional variations of first order flow statistics, and 8 in three different Meddies (Mediterranean water eddies) in collaboration with investigators from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Rhode Island. The floats were launched in 1984 and 1985, and tracked with U.S. and French ALSs (moored listening stations) from October 1984 to June 1988. This report includes a summary of the whole three and a half year experiment, the final year and a half of data processed from the third ALS setting (October 1986-June 1988), and the first deep sea test of Bobber EB014 in the eastern subtropical North Atlantic (May 1986-May 1988). Approximately 60 years of float trajectories were produced during the three and a half years of the experiment.