Using long-time series of temperature and currents to contextualize the physical environment
Dr Madeleine Cahill1
1Australian Institute Of Marine Science, Townsville, Australia
The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) has maintained 17 moorings at strategic locations on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), across North-West shelf and Ningaloo Reef, in some places for over 10 years. These moorings have been funded as part of Australia’s Integrated marine Observing System (IMOS) to provide long time series of temperature and velocity data throughout the water column.
at each of these moorings we have incorporated satellite sea surface temperature (SST) to create a temperature climatology that spans the full depth of the water column. In this way, temperature observations at any level can be interpreted with respect to conditions over the last decade. Velocity data is filtered to remove the tides and to allow easy interpretation of the low frequency water flow which is mostly responsible for particle transport. These mooring products can be explored via a web-interface and are a first step in providing easy access to environmental ocean data.
Biography:
Madeleine Cahill is a physical oceanography working in the fields of coastal oceanography, ocean data analysis and altimetry. Prior to taking up an appointment at AIMS Madeleine ran the IMOS OceanCurrent website.
