The Global Irminger Sea Surface Mooring and Central Pioneer Surface Mooring (along with the de-scoped Southern Ocean and Argentine Basin Array Surface Moorings) all have 2 METBK instruments for redundancy. They are connected to different platform control data loggers (DCLs) so that if we need to reduce power, one can stay on while the other is shut down.
For the Southern Ocean, the Reference Designators for these 2 instruments are:
- GS01SUMO-SBD11-06-METBKA000
- GS01SUMO-SBD12-06-METBKA000
Because these instruments are co-located, the data streams should be very similar. However, there may be cases where due to the orientation of the buoy or instrument failures, the datasets will be different.
Determination of the best data set from the redundant sensors is up to the user. OOI provides annotations for known bad data, and is currently working towards automated QA/QC for the METBK instrument based on QARTOD standards. To aid with data validation, it is common practice to deploy the “new” mooring with freshly calibrated sensors prior to recovery of the “old” mooring. This allows for data quality assessment at the start and end of each deployment.
In addition, meteorological data can be validated by shipboard measurements that are collected during deployment and recovery operations. The times when comparison measurements are made are typically documented in the cruise Quick-Look Reports or Cruise Reports which can be found in Alfresco.
For the Southern Ocean 4 cruise, the cruise reports are here:
OOI > Global Southern Ocean Array > Cruise Data > Southern_Ocean-04_NBP1709_2017-11-23
The shipboard data can be found in Alfresco for each cruise under the Ship Data folder. The exact location and format of the ship data will vary, depending on which ship was used. If you have trouble finding the appropriate shipboard datasets, reach out to the OOI Data Team via Discourse or helpdesk@oceanobservatories.org