Ambrose Channel Lightship
Sub-Surface Data

amb_sal.dat - Surface and bottom seawater salinities tab delimited digitized by K.Elder WHOI from USCG Reports. Approximate period Dec. 1955 - Dec. 1971.

ambrose.ls -  Subsurface mbt (mechanical bathythermograph) data for the period Dec 1955 - Nov. 1972 at 5 m intervals given to K. Elder by George Hiemerdinger who read it from an NCDC CDROM.  Data format information is available here.
Apparently there were two groups reading the mbt slides, one at Woods Hole whose work was published in the Coast Guard Reports, and the other at NCDC. The NCDC group read the slide at 5 meter intervals whereas the WH group read them at 15 meter intervals.

ambrose_ls.kle - Data from ambrose.ls file -  field names added, formatted and delimited by K. Elder.


Meteorological Data

ambrose.td1129 - Meteorological records (rsz=148 - TD-1129 sfc marine) pulled from TD-1129 marine database for the period approximately 1970-1973. File ftpd from NCDC October 1997 via Joe Elms. These data were keyed at NCDC as part of what he called the "New York Bight Study" led by Bill Brower (also at NCDC) much of which was merged into COADS data (>1970). If you need the format for TD-1129 it can be copied off the web at
http://www4.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/documentlibrary/datasets.html#TD1129
or can be opened as a Microsoft Word document here td1129.doc.

ambrose.tdf11 - Meteorological records (rsz=140 - TDF-11 sfc marine) ftpd from NCDC October 1997 via Joe Elms for the period Jan 1961 - Mar 1973. These data were also part of  the "New York Bight Study" but the entire period was not merged into COADS data as of 1997.  This file overlaps what is in TD1129 format above.
    The data collected and keyed at NCDC for the New York Bight Study were originally placed into the TDF-11 format with a few modifications. Deviations from the TDF-11 format for this file are that in positions 78-79 in place of the Ocean Weather Station Number (OSV - Ocean Station Vessel) or Country Code they placed the last two digits of the ship number (e.g. Ambrose, 0501). Also in position 81 (OSV or ship indicator), a blank, 9, or 0 appears, the 9 always appears with 1960's data and 0 from the 1970's. Documentation for the TDF-11 format is not available digitally but I have separated the fields in the file listed next (amb_tdf11.kle) and have supporting documentation for the data available here.
    Overpunches occur in this set and generally indicate a negative value.  They are usually an 11 punch over a number which gets converted to a letter in a printout or for screen viewing.   e.g. a letter J represents a negative value over a 1 , a K =-2, L= -3 ........Q=-8, and  R = -9.  An 11 punch over a 0 is generally not converted and what you see is a blank character, sometimes it appears as a left-handed brace (you may have to examine these punches in hex to see what was actually punched).

amb_tdf11.kle - The data from ambrose.tdf11 for the period Jan 1961 - Mar 1973, massaged by K. Elder; formatted into tab delimited labelled columns with overpunches converted to real numbers. The perl script tdf11.perl and awk script jday.awk was used for this work. A description of the fields can be found here.

amb_sal.dat - Surface and bottom seawater salinities tab delimited digitized by K.Elder WHOI from USCG Reports. Approximate period Dec. 1955 - Dec. 1971.

ambrose.ls -  Subsurface mbt (mechanical bathythermograph) data for the period Dec 1955 - Nov. 1972 at 5 m intervals given to K. Elder by George Hiemerdinger who read it from an NCDC CDROM.  Data format information is available here.
Apparently there were two groups reading the mbt slides, one at Woods Hole whose work was published in the Coast Guard Reports, and the other at NCDC. The NCDC group read the slide at 5 meter intervals whereas the WH group read them at 15 meter intervals.

ambrose_ls.kle - Data from ambrose.ls file -  field names added, formatted and delimited by K. Elder.

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