WOCE Pacific Workshop Data and Model Information

Newport Beach, CA
August 19-23, 1996

The workshop ended August 23. No more information is being added to this page.

The report of the workshop is now available.

This data and modeling information is gathered in support of the WOCE Pacific Workshop. The information and structure of this page will be evolving continuously throughout the workshop; if workshop participants have changes, additions, or corrections, please contact L. Talley ltalley@ucsd.edu. Workshop participants who are responsible for each of the items below are indicated; these include directors and/or representatives of the data assembly centers, etc.

Registration information and meeting abstracts are available through the Workshop site at the U.S. WOCE Office.

Computer network and software information for the workshop is available at a separate location. Handouts are available at the workshop.

A Pacific Data Summary was prepared by the WOCE Data Information Unit for the workshop.

Table of Contents

Working group topics and questions

Pacific Data Summary

The WOCE Data Information Unit summarizes all of the field program information. They have prepared a special summary for the Pacific.
  • Hydrography (Discrete and CTD)
  • ADCP
  • XBT/XCTD
  • Moorings
  • Floats
  • Drifters
  • Sea level
  • Winds, surface fluxes and surface properties
  • Bathymetry
  • Altimetry and other satellite data

    Pacific modeling and assimilation

  • General circulation models
  • Assimilation

    Bibliography, connections to WOCE Offices and other useful information

  • WOCE Bibliography We suggest that you check this and see if your papers and others that you know about are included. Send any corrections to the WOCE DIU (woce.diu@diu.cms.udel.edu). See Bert Thompson at the workshop (DIU rep.)
  • WOCE International Project Office (Peter Saunders)
  • U.S. WOCE Office (Piers Chapman)
  • NOAA/GOOS: Eric's hot list of WOCE information (Eric Lindstrom)
  • NODC WOCE data status and search of current WOCE data holdings at NODC.

    Hydrographic data

    Maps:

  • Map of Pacific WOCE one-time hydrographic survey.
  • Station positions for Pacific WOCE one-time survey stations.
  • Map of Pacific WOCE repeat hydrographic data.

    Data and data products available at or prepared for workshop:

  • Electronic atlas of WOCE hydrographic data, prepared for the Pacific workshop by the WHPO, including section plots of CTD and tracer data, the original data sets and documentation, and property/property plots (Terrence Joyce).
  • Composite WHP section atlas: down-loadable objectively mapped CTD property files and plots for a number of composite WHP sections. (Lynne Talley)
  • PRS2 (HOT) CTD/Bottle Contours (Roger Lukas)
  • Tritium-helium sections from Pacific WOCE: 10N and 32S (P6) (Bill Jenkins)
  • Tritium-helium sections from Pacific WOCE: 135W (P17), 88W (P19), 47N (P1/TPS47) and 24N (P3/TPS24) and a map of the Loihi helium plume (John Lupton and Roland Well)
  • OceanAtlas An interactive atlas for hydrographic data. Many Pacific WOCE sections were added for the workshop; available on a PowerMac at the workshop. A commercial version of the OceanAtlas is also being produced. (Jim Swift)
  • South Pacific climatology prepared by the WOCE SAC. Login to the workshop machine indian as user tshydro or cd to tshydro, then cd to WHPSAC. Use the command xds to view the two files pacific.hdf and southern.hdf. (Victor Gouretski and Kai Jancke)
  • GOODBase (Norm Hall, Steve Diggs and Warren White)
  • Hydrobase. (Curry, Lozier and Owens for the North Atlantic), being expanded to the Pacific by A. MacDonald, T. Suga, and S. Wijffels, all attending the workshop. (Currently no website.)

    Permanent data sources:

  • WOCE Special Analyis Center (Jancke and Gouretski) : all public WHP data sets.
  • WOCE SAC mirror at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, identical to SAC holdings (faster transmission time in the U.S.) (Newton and Talley)
  • WOCE Hydrographic Program Office (WHPO) at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Joyce)
  • Scripps Institution of Oceanography's nemo data server: WHP SAC mirror, an on-line search program of the NODC hydrographic data holdings, a database of selected CTD cruises, the CALCOFI database, a metadata database including most WHP station positions, and other useful programs and data sets. (David Newton)
  • GOODBase (Norm Hall, Steve Diggs and Warren White)

    Data information and availability:

  • WOCE DIU information about hydrography (Thompson)

    ADCP data

    Maps:

  • Shipboard ADCP vectors (25m-75m layer). Data from Chereskin, Joyce, Firing/Hacker and Kosro. (Donohue)
  • Lowered ADCP station locations. (Donohue)

    Data and data products available at or prepared for workshop:

  • U. Hawaii ADCP data sets and gridded underway ADCP data (possible site at the workshop) (Firing, Hacker and Donohue)
  • Scripps Institution of Oceanography WOCE Pacific data sets. P17N shipboard ADCP data will be available via ftp for P17N. (Teri Chereskin)
  • JMA data sets for P9 and P24. The data and plots will be available at the workshop on floppy disk (MS-DOS). (Kaneko)
  • Oregon State University WOCE Pacific ADCP data sets (Mike Kosro). He will not be attending the meeting, but has collected ship-mounted ADCP upper ocean current profiles along P6, P14C, and P21. He also has LADCP full ocean depth profiles for the western half of P21.

    Permanent data sources

  • JODC shipboard ADCP archive (ADCP co-DAC) (Hishida)
  • NOAA/NODC shipboard ADCP archive (ADCP co-DAC) (Caldwell)

    Data information and availability

  • WOCE DIU information about ADCP data (Thompson)

    XBT/XCTD data

    Data and data products available at or prepared for workshop:

  • High resolution XBT data: a large number of temperature section plots are available for the workshop on the workstation beqa (Janet Sprintall and Dean Roemmich).

    Permanent data sources

  • WOCE DAC (MEDS)
  • JEDA Center (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Warren White and Steve Diggs)
  • GOODBase (Hall, Diggs and White)
  • NOAA/AOML
  • Access to XBT data through NODC

    Data information and availability

  • WOCE DIU information about XBT data (Thompson)

    Moorings

    Map

    WOCE DIU Map of current meter arrays

    Data and data products available at or prepared for workshop:

  • PCM5. Shiro Imawaki
  • "PCM2". (This was an ONR-funded eastern boundary current intiative, at the nominal location of WOCE PCM2. The data are not yet public.) Chereskin
  • Current meter array near the Indonesian throughflow (Kashino)
  • Current meter arrays near the site of PCM7 (Mitsuzawa; also Hallock abstract)

    Permanent data sources:

  • WOCE Current Meter DAC at Oregon State University. It has PCM7, PCM9, PCM11 and PCM15. Only PCM9 is public. (Pillsbury)

    Data information and availability

  • WOCE DIU information about current meter moorings (Thompson)

    Floats

    Maps

  • Tropical and South Pacific (Russ Davis)
  • Northeast Pacific (Howard Freeland)

    Data and data products available at or prepared for workshop:

  • ALACE floats in the tropical and South Pacific (Davis, SIO)
  • ALACE floats in the NE Pacific (Freeland, IOS)
  • U. Washington SOFAR floats in the western N. Pacific (Riser and LeBel)

    Permanent data sources

  • WOCE float DAC (Richardson)

    Data information and availability:

  • WOCE DIU information about Pacific floats (Thompson)

    Drifters

    Maps:

    Maps from the
  • AOML Drifting Buoy Data Assembly Center
    Maps from the
  • Marine Environmental Data Service.

    Data and data products available at or prepared for workshop:

  • Canadian WOCE drifter data in the NE Pacific (Bailey, Leblond, Steve Bograd). (http address for workshop to be provided - data will be online).
  • East China Sea (Lie)

    Permanent data sources:

  • WOCE drifter DAC at MEDS
  • TOGA/WOCE drifter database at NOAA/AOML (Swenson)
  • TOGA/WOCE drifter database at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. At the meeting, please see Sharon Lukas or Peter Niiler about access to the data. (Niiler)

    Data information and availability:

  • WOCE DIU information about Pacific drifters (Thompson)

    Sea level

    Permanent data sources

  • Fast mode sea level data U. Hawaii Sea Level Center (Kilonsky)
  • Delayed mode sea level data at Bidston (archive)

    Data information and availability

  • WOCE DIU information about sea level data (Thompson)

    Winds, surface fluxes and surface properties

    Data and products available especially for the workshop

  • WOCE DAC/SAC surface flux fields will be online at the workshop (Legler)
  • Met fields from ECMWF and NMC such as wind stress, sea level pressure, and surface heat fluxes. (Stammer)

    Permanent data sources

  • WOCE DAC/SAC for surface fluxes and winds at Florida State University (Legler, O'Brien)

    Data information and availability

  • WOCE DIU information about surface fluxes (Thompson)

    Bathymetry

    Permanent data sources

  • National Geological Data Center archives of underway bathymetry data
  • etopo5 on nemo.ucsd.edu : one of many places to obtain etopo5 data, using remote login program for extracting data at desired resolution

    Data information and availability

  • WOCE DIU information about bathymetric data (Thompson)

    Altimetry and other satellite data

    Data and products at the workshop

  • Animation of SSH variability from Geosat-ERM, ERS-1 and T/P (to be online at the workshop, Gregg Jacobs)
  • Complete MIT Topex/Poseidon data set (alongtrack data, gridded fields on a 2x2 degree grid every 10 days. (to be online at the workshop, Detlef Stammer)

    Permanent data sources

  • JPL TOPEX homepage (Fu, Fukumori, Chelton, Koblinsky)
  • NOAA Geosciences Lab gridded TOPEX data
  • U. Texas Austin gridded TOPEX data
  • 'Near real-time' sea surface height from the U. Colorado at Boulder.

    Data information and availability

  • WOCE DIU information about satellite data
  • JPL TOPEX homepage (Thompson)
  • general NASA/JPL information

    General circulation models

  • 1/4 Degree Parallel Ocean Climate Model (Robin Tokmakian)
  • 1/4 Degree POCM: data extracted along WHP lines (Robin Tokmakian)
  • OCCAM (Ocean Circulation and Climate Advanced Model) results (Peter Saunders)
  • Lamont Ocean Model results, linked through the Lamont Climate Data Library (Wei Wang)
  • Semtner-Chervin model
  • Large scale modeling using the Navy Layered Ocean Model (Harley Hurlburt, Joe Metzger)
  • Low latitude western boundary currents using the Navy Layered Ocean Model (Harley Hurlburt, Joe Metzger)
  • NRL model - animation of a small portion, to be online on the SGI Indy being brought by Legler. (Steven Meyers)

    Data Assimilation and state estimation

  • Tropical Pacific near real time analyses (Ming Ji)

    Working Groups and topics

    Heat and freshwater fluxes

    Basic WOCE goal
    How close to doing these calculations are we for the Pacific? Error bounds?
    How well can divergence between sections constrain surface fluxes and vece versa?
    How well can surface layer budgets constrain fluxes?

    Overall circulation

    Monday: surface layer. near-surface circulation, surface forcing, mixed layer physics coupled to interior, subduction processes
    Tuesday: Large scale variability. Scales and processes of variability as seen in TOPEX/POSEIDON, OGCM's, other measurements.
    Wednesday: split into a group focusing on surface fluxes, and other members join one of the other groups.

    Abyssal circulation

    Define and quantify the abyssal circulation
    Deep western boundary currents
    Mechanisms for driving abyssal circulation
    upwelling, role of mixing

    Western gyre regions

    Western boundary currents - transports, structure and variability
    Source of water for the WBC's, mixing associated with water masses, variability, relation of transports to forcing strength
    NECC bifurcation
    Kuroshio/Oyashio separation
    topographic steering
    Indonesian throughflow

    Central/eastern regions

    Define circulation, relation of gyre to eastern boundary currents
    Gyre-gyre communication
    Variability - forcing, time scales, downward propoagation. Relation to tropics and other regions.

    Ventilation

    Tuesday: shallow/mode water and thermocline ventilation in the subtropics, evidence of subduction/boeuction? Comparison of CFC/THe ages with buoyancy fluxes. Oxygen minima and nutrient traps
    Wednesday: Intermediate water formation and mechanisms. NPIW and AAIW
    Friday: tracers vs. ventilation vs. circulation ages and rates, model validation and data assimilation.

    Low latitudes (Firing)

    General circulation and water masses in the tropics; equatorial jets; tropical variability and assimilation, Indonesian throughflow, NECC bifurcation.

    Subpolar gyre (Niiler)

    Wednesday - is there heating in the subpolar gyre and what are its consequences? This was a subgroup of the heat transport group and its results are included in the heat transport report.

    Surface flux comparisons (Legler)

    Discuss the need and approaches for up- to-date evaluations of available surface flux fields in order to qualify them for WOCE-related activities. The report of this group appears with that of the heat transport group.

    What does Topex/Poseidon imply about circulation at depth? (Wunsch)

    Where does altimetry primarily reflect the first baroclinic mode, the barotropic mode, and higher modes? What in situ observations are needed to further test this? What do models indicate?

    General circulation based on 1-time WHP sections, XBTs, floats and ADCP (Toole)

    What results are available from the 1-time WHP sections and XBT's? How will we proceed towards a synthesis?

    Seasonality of the Kuroshio transport (Imawaki)

    Can we reconcile the seasonal cycle based on in situ observations, forcing and models? What further analysis and observations would be useful?

    Climatology

    Data availability and accessibility - going beyond formal mechanisms. Long-term recommendations to DACs.
    Data products. What sorts of traditional atalses, electr4onic atlases, gridded products are desired (and useful) for observers, modelers, and assimilators?
    Methods? Who and when?

    Data assimilation

    What needs to be done in model data comparisons?
    Methods for very difficult WOCE problems of large-scale, long time-scale data sets?
    Generally identify who is doing what in assimilating, including TOPEX, XBT's etc.

    Model-data and model-model comparisons

    1. Quantitative measures for comparing data and models, including temporal information and larger-scale, longer-term information.
    2. Quantitative measures for comparing models with models, including performance of low resolution vs. high resolution models.
    3. Consider an Ocean Model Intercomparison Project.