Quasi-Real Time Measurements of Density in the Gulf of Maine

We are monitoring the temperature and salinity in the Gulf of Maine with four moored buoy systems deployed from August 1986 through September 1987. Each buoy has solar power, a microprocessor-based data acquisition system, cassette tape backup and GOES satellite telemetry. The data system controls the power to the sensors and produces hourly samples. The past six hours of data are transmitted every three hours. One buoy has an ARGOS transmitter to give buoy position as well. The data is automatically accessed daily. The processing is semi-automated. Transmission times are verified, duplicates eliminated, missing transmissions filled with "null" data, and redundancy in the data is checked and bad data eliminated. Time series plots and time-depth contour plots are created for daily study, and the data is accumulated for further processing and archiving. The system has worked well for ten months, with data returned to the laboratory in near real time to monitor system performance and yield timely information for scientific purposes.