Introduction
This data report presents the temperature field across the North Atlantic Ocean between
the English Channel and the Grand Banks in 1989 in the form of profiles and section
plots. Owing to the kind support of the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd AG in Ham
burg, F.R.Germany, and the willing co-operation of the crews of CMS "Köln Atlantic",
the measurements have been carried out since May 1988, using expendable
bathythermographs (XBT) launched from the bridge wing during the ship’s bi-weekly
passages across the North Atlantic.
In 1989, however, efforts were reduced to monthly measurements only. Due to the
prevailing westerly winds, these were carried out during the eastbound passage of the
North Atlantic - except for cruise No. 134. According to preliminary results of the 1988
measurements the temporal variability of the thermal field of the upper ocean should
still be sufficiently resolved. As a compromise between an eddy resolving strategy and
the workload put on the ship’s officers during their highly automated single man watch
on the bridge the spatial resolution of XBT drops was decided to be between 30 and
40 nautical miles.
This Ship-of-Opportunity Programme (SOOP) is a contribution to the Integrated Global
Ocean Services System (IGOSS) as well as to the World Ocean Circulation Experiment
(WOCE). The specific objectives of this programme, methods of measurement, flow and
processing of data are described in Sy and Ulrich (1989) and Sy (1990) and thus need
not to be repeated here. Except for some aspects concerning the data quality, which will
be discussed in the next sections, the technical environment is kept unchanged.
The final data are archived in the Deutsches Ozeanographisches Datenzentrum (DOD)
which is operated by DHI (recently renamed in "Bundesamt für Seeschiffahrt und
Hydrographie" (BSH)). These data are available for personal use, in particular for
WOCE. However, any use of these data should be agreed on with the originators prior
to their publication. Special reservations are made concerning topics such as statistical
analysis, heat content, wintertime convection, and North Atlantic Current, which are the
primary reason of this SOOP.
