Initial results from the Bermuda Testbed Mooring program

The Bermuda Testbed Mooring (BTM) has been deployed since June 1994 and provides the oceanographic community with a deep-water platform for testing and intercomparing new instruments. The mooring is located about 80 km southeast of Bermuda. Surface instruments collect meteorological and spectral radiometric measurements from a buoy tower. Measurements at depth include: currents, temperature, conductivity, optical properties, and nitrate and trace element concentrations. Data have been sent to shore and to a nearby ship using a new inductive-link telemetry system. The high temporal resolution, long-term data collected from the mooring provide important information concerning episodic and periodic processes ranging in scale from minutes to years. For example, short nitrate pulses and associated biological events have been observed in the mooring data sets, which were not seen in the periodic ship-collected time-series data. Evaluation of undersampling and aliasing effects characteristic of infrequent sampling are also enabled with these data sets. The primary purposes of this report are to describe new systems and to illustrate early data resulting from the BTM program. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.