Solomon Sea Transport Time-Series - California Underwater Glider Network at University of California San Diego
Original (non-English) name
Acronym
Solomon Sea Transport Time-Series - CUGN-UCSD
Citation
When using the Solomon Sea transport data, please cite:
DOIs for the glider data and products:
Full data set including temperature, salinity and velocity:
Davis, R. (2016). Solomon Sea Ocean Transport from Gliders [Data set]. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Instrument Development Group. doi: 10.21238/S8SPRAY2718
Transport time series shown on this webpage:
Kessler, W.S. and H.G. Hristova (2016). Solomon Sea volume transport time- series measured by glider [Data set]. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Instrument Development Group. doi: 10.21238/S8SPRAY2718A
Journal article describing the data preparation and processing, as well as scientific results:
Kessler, W.S., H.G. Hristova and R.E. Davis, 2019: Equatorward western boundary transport from the South Pacific: Glider observations, dynamics and consequences. Progress in Oceanography, 175, 208-225, doi: 10.1016/j.pocean.2019.04.005
Abstract
The Solomon Sea transport time series is derived from more than a decade of Spray glider missions in the Solomon Sea (https://spraydata.ucsd.edu/projects/Solomon/) providing measurements of temperature, salinity and vertically-averaged over the dive depth horizontal velocity.
For the transport calculations, only the segments of missions spanning the distance between Rossel and Gizo are considered (Fig 1). A mission includes between 1 to 4 cross-sections across the mouth of the Solomon Sea (labeled with a letter “a,b,c,d” after the mission name). Both northern and southern tracks are included in the time-series (marked “N” or “S” in SolomonSea_bysection.txt).
The transport for each section is computed as the coast-to-coast integral of the absolute cross-track geostrophic velocity, obtained from the glider-measured temperature, salinity and vertically-averaged velocity. Earlier missions measured transport to 700 m, later missions (since mid-2013) to 1000 m (Fig. 2). Data from some of the more recent mission is not yet quality-controlled and transport estimates are only preliminary (and marked with asterisk in SolomonSea_bysection.txt).
A low-pass monthly time-series represents a smoothed version of the individual section transport time-series capturing its low-frequency variability (Fig.2). The low-pass transport is defined as the sum of the average annual cycle plus the anomalies from this smoothed by a 5-month triangle filter (see Kessler et al. 2019, Section 2.2 for details). Transport through the Solomon Sea varies strongly on ENSO timescales, with large transport occurring during El Niño events (Fig.3). The data files provides both the total and interannual anomaly of the low-pass transport time-series, evaluated monthly.