Barnegat Lightship

Sub-Surface Data

U.S.C.G. Report Data:
Barnegat Lightship 39 45.8' N 73 56'  W, 72 ft., Jan 1958 - Dec 1960 0, 30, 50, 70 ft. Temp, Sal
Barnegat Lightship 39 45.8' N 73 56'  W, 78 ft., Jan 1961 - Dec 1961 0, 30, 50, 78 ft. Temp, Sal
Barnegat Lightship 39 45.8' N 73 56'  W, 80 ft., Jan 1962 - Dec 1962 0, 30, 50, 80 ft. Temp, Sal
Barnegat Lightship 39 45.8' N 73 56'  W, 24 m., Jan 1963 - Dec 1967 0, 9, 15, 24 m. Temp, Sal
Barnegat Lightship 39 45.8' N 73 46'  W, 26 m., Jan 1968 - Feb 1970 0, 9, 15, 26 m. Temp, Sal
Lightship discontinued Feb. 1970

barnegat.sub - Records of daily water temperatures and salinity observations for the period Jan. 1958 - Feb. 1970.  MBT (mechanical bathythermograph) slides read at 15 meter intervals by group at Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst. This file is data digitized from U.S.C.G. Oceanographic Reports by the Orkand company at NCDC in fall of 1998. Information regarding keying format can be found here. See list of U.S.C.G. Report Data  above for actual depth of measurements and changes in locality and water depth of the Lightship and look here for more background information.

barnegat_sub.kle - Data from barnegat.sub, tab-delimited with fields labelled by K. Elder.

barnegat.ls - Subsurface MBT (mechanical bathythermograph) data for the period 1956 - 1969 at 5 m intervals  read from an NCDC CDROM. The file was given to K. Elder by NODC liason George Hiemerdinger.  The records are not in chronological order.  Information for the format of this data can be found here.
 Note:           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 seems to have read the slides at 5 meter intervals whereas the WH group read them at 15 meter intervals.

barnegat.txt - tab-delimited file of barnegat.ls data with field names and sorted by K. Elder.


Meteorological Data

barnegat.tdf11 - Meteorological records (rsz=140 - TDF-11 sfc marine) ftpd from NCDC October 1997 via Joe Elms for the period  1961 - 1970. These data were part of  the "New York Bight Study" and were merged into COADS data.

      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.
      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).
     The perl script tdf11.perl and awk script jday.awk can be used to convert this format into a labelled, delimited matrix. A description of the fields produced with these scripts can be found here.
 

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