- Industry: Education
- Number of terms: 34386
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Founded in 1876, Texas A&M University is a U.S. public and comprehensive university offering a wide variety of academic programs far beyond its original label of agricultural and mechanical trainings. It is one of the few institutions holding triple federal designations as a land-, sea- and ...
A subsurface float introduced by Thomas Rossby in 1985 that listens to acoustic signals instead of transmitting (like the earlier SOFAR float). At the end of its mission it surfaces by dropping a weight and uploads to the Argos satellite all the information it collected at depth, including the Times of Arrovals (TOAs) of pulses sent by sources at known geographical positions.
Industry:Earth science
A surface to which the force of gravity is everywhere perpendicular and equal. No work is necessary for the displacement of mass along a potential surface as long as no other forces act in addition to gravity. This can also be defined as a surface of equal dynamic height below the level of the sea surface, using the ideal sea surface level as a reference surface with the potential value 0. This has also been called a potential surface or a level surface.
Industry:Earth science
A Swedish chemist and physical oceanographer who organized many of the earliest cooperative cruises in Scandanavian waters and promoted the idea of what would become the ICES.
Industry:Earth science
A synoptic meteorology rule stating that if, in the northern hemisphere, an observer stands with his back to the wind, pressure is lower on his left hand than on his right, while in the southern hemisphere the converse is true. This was enunciated by Buys Ballot of Utrecht in 1857 and is basically a restatement of the fact that winds blow clockwise around a depression in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere.
Industry:Earth science
A system created to serve the communications and data quality enhancement needs of the NOAA ocean community.
Industry:Earth science
A system for counting the number and size distribution of particles in sea water ranging from 250 microns to several millimeters in size. LAPS consists of a video camera synchronized with a strobe light which flashes at predetermined intervals as the instrument is lowered through the water column. The light is focused so it illuminates only a narrow slab of water where the video camera records images of the large particles in the water. The video images are analyzed using software which counts the number of particles and determines their maximum and minimum dimensions if they are not circular, and this data is used to estimate a volume and mass of the imaged particles. LAPS is an integral part of the Particle and Optics Profiling System (POPS).
Industry:Earth science
A system for management, display, and analysis of oceanographic in-situ data. This was developed at the NOAA PMEL to manage the large numbers of hydrographic and time series oceanographic in-situ data sets collected as part of NOAA climate study programs such as EPOCS, TOGA, WOCE and CLIVAR. There are over 100,000 individual data sets within the database, some of which can be accessed via a Web interface.
Industry:Earth science
A system of facilities established within the framework of the IOC IODE program to receive oceanographic data and inventories from NODCs, RNODCs, marine science organizations, and individual scientists. The data are collected and submitted voluntarily from national programs or arise from international cooperative ventures. The WDCs are also responsbile for monitoring the performance of the international data exchange system.
Industry:Earth science
A systematic attempt to apply hydrography to describe the waters of the ocean as developed by Wust and his students in the 1930s. In this method he distinguished between different core layers characterized by maxima or minima in their oxygen, salinity or temperature fields. While of unquestioned descriptive value, this method has some significant limitations. The number of layers that can be identified using this techique is limited, e.g. Wust identified just seven such layers in the North Atlantic, a shortcoming ameliorated by the development of the isopycnal method. Also, these layers were too often uncritically assumed to be the main paths of ocean circulation, an assumption that has been proven to be incorrect on more than one occasion.
Industry:Earth science
A technique introduced by Jacobsen (1927) as a graphical method for determining mixing coefficients in a T–S diagram. It was extended by W¨ust in 1935 who developed his core layer method. This was further extended by Tomczak (1981) who developed a multi–parameter analysis technique by adding oxygen and nutrients as additional quasi–conservative parameters. This idea was further developed into what is currently known as Optimum Multiparameter Analysis (OMP).
Industry:Earth science
