Bernard KILONSKY

University of Hawaii

Sea Level Data Assembly Center at the University of Hawaii

One of the major missions of the UH Sea Level Center (UHSLC) is to collect, process, and distribute sea level data and products in support of various multi-national field programs (e.g., TOGA, WOCE) and for climate and global change research. Focused under this mission the UHSLC has four primary functions:

  1. The maintenance of the Indo-Pacific Sea Level Network (IPSLN), an array of 42 tide gauges, most with satellite data telemetry, located in the tropical portions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans;

  2. The collection and quality assessment of sea level data from various contributors world-wide (including the IPSLN) for inclusion in a research quality data base.

  3. The collection and distribution of sea level data in near-real time.

  4. The production of sea surface topography maps (monthly) and diagnostic time series (quarterly) for the Pacific Ocean as part of the IGOSS Sea Level Project in the Pacific (ISLP-Pac).

The UHSLC is the Data Assembly Center (DAC) for the near-real time, or "fast delivery," sea level data for WOCE. In the WOCE Implementation Plan, in situ sea level data were identified as being useful for two major purposes:

  1. To compare the observations made during the WOCE period to longer time series in order to evaluate the representativeness of the WOCE time frame.

  2. For joint use with satellite altimeters, such as TOPEX/POSEIDON.

It was recognized, however, that this second requirement meant that sea level data would have to be collected, processed, and made available to scientists much more quickly than had been done in the past. The altimetry data are available within a month or so of collection; if the sea level data are to be of maximum utility, then they should be available on a comparable time scale. The experience at the UHSLC with operational delivery of sea level data made it a logical place to establish such an effort.

All of the UHSLC data have been available on the Internet via a World-Wide Web site (www.soest.hawaii.edu/kilonsky/uhslc.html) and an "anonymous" ftp account (kia.soest.hawaii.edu). The DAC "fast delivery" holdings now include data from 102 stations and efforts are continuing to increase this number. In the past year, 472 users accessed the DAC "fast delivery" Internet site and 4,769 station files have been copied. These statistics only include sea level data files distributed, not WWW page accesses. For 61 stations, the existing time series have been extended backward to 1985 in order to connect Geosat altimetric data with the present TOPEX data set.

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