Abstract:

The oceanographic community routinely collects time-series data of hydrographic properties and water current velocity of the marine environment. Such data are essential for establishing baseline characteristics of marine and estuarine ecosystems. This data comes from a small coastal ocean observing system 25 kilometers southwest of the mouth of Mobile Bay, Alabama, that the Dauphin Island Sea Lab has been operating. The data were collected between 2010-05-05 and 2010-09-29. The instruments were swapped out four times during this period of time, and so the resulting velocity from an upward looking ADCP data has four files.

Suggested Citation:

Brian Dzwonkowski, Kyeong Park, Mimi Tzeng. 2018. Fisheries Oceanography in Coastal Alabama (FOCAL) Velocity data from mooring, May-September 2010. Distributed by: GRIIDC, Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. doi:10.7266/N72Z140Q

Publications:

Dzwonkowski, B., Fournier, S., Park, K., Dykstra, S. L., & Reager, J. T. (2018). Water Column Stability and the Role of Velocity Shear on a Seasonally Stratified Shelf, Mississippi Bight, Northern Gulf of Mexico. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 123(8), 5777–5796. doi:10.1029/2017jc013624

Purpose:

The objective of this ongoing research is monitor the physical structure of the coastal ocean. This data is a subset of the regularly maintained FOCAL mooring. The site is the longest running time series of water column data in the Mississippi Bight and is an important asset for assessing long-term changes in the physical state of the region.

Data Parameters and Units:

Sample number (n), Bin, Year (y), Month (m), Day (d), Hour (h), Minute (min), Julian day of the year minus 1 (t_day, CST), Total depth (tdep, m), Bin depth above the seafloor (dep, m), Water column velocity - horizontal (u, cm/s), Water column velocity - horizontal (v, cm/s), Speed (spd), Direction (dir, degree magnetic or degrees true), Data error flag (ECMP), * indicates an interpolated value. Hydrographic and current velocity data from this site have been used in multiple physical and interdisciplinary studies of circulation, hydrography, and the biophysical interactions associated with the inner shelf of the Northern Gulf of Mexico. The DISL mooring is located at 30°05.410'N, 88°12.694'W, 25 km southwest of Mobile Bay, Alabama. ADCP files 100505_100609.dat 100609_100715.dat 100715_100824.dat 100824_100929.dat Raw RDI ADCP files MAY11000.000 JUN11000.000 JUL11000.000 AUG11000.000 Need RDI software to convert to human readable files. WinADCP [Teledyne, 2015] can export data from the raw file (*.000) directly to a MATLAB file without requiring additional reformatting steps.

Methods:

The ADCP does a 5-minute burst sample (5 minute average) every 20 minutes

Instruments:

RDI 600 kHz ADCP Workhorse Sentinel (upward looking on the bottom)

Individual Files: