The NOAA IR serves as an archival repository of NOAA-published products including scientific findings, journal articles, guidelines, recommendations, or other information authored or co-authored by NOAA or funded partners.
As a repository, the NOAA IR retains documents in their original published format to ensure public access to scientific information.
i
Comparison of ATLAS and T-Flex Mooring Data
-
2018
-
Details:
-
Personal Author:
-
Corporate Authors:
-
NOAA Program & Office:
-
Description:Autonomous Temperature Line Acquisition System (ATLAS) moorings have been the predominant mooring systems deployed in tropical moored buoy arrays since 1984. The present version ATLAS was used extensively in all three tropical ocean basins beginning in 2000 and continues as a significant component of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean arrays. Obsolescence of some ATLAS components, technological advancements in commercially available instruments, and a new, more capable satellite telemetry system not available when ATLAS was designed prompted NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) to develop a new tropical mooring system, called TropicalFlex (T-Flex). This system was designed to provide data with quality comparable to or better than that of the ATLAS system, so that multi-decadal ATLAS time series can be continued efficiently and without bias caused by changes in measurement strategy, consistent with the “Ten Climate Monitoring Principles” (Karl et al., 1996). Between 2011 and 2015 eight pairs of ATLAS and T-Flex moorings were deployed in the tropical Atlantic and Indian oceans, typically separated by a few nautical miles, to measure their relative performance in terms of real time and delayed-mode data volume, consistency, and accuracy. This report describes the design and testing of the PMEL T-Flex mooring system. We show that T-Flex meets our design criteria with both real-time and delayed-mode data being of equivalent accuracy to those of the ATLAS system. T-Flex began to replace ATLAS moorings in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean tropical mooring arrays in 2015.
-
Keywords:
-
Series:
-
DOI:
-
Document Type:
-
Name as Subject:
-
License:
-
Rights Information:CC0 Public Domain
-
Compliance:Submitted
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type: