On behalf of our partners in the EUROFLOAT Project (European Commission MAST II Project, Contract No.MAS2-CT94-0102) we are pleased to submit the data of Part I, our surfaced floats (13 out of 15).

Note: The quality of the surfaced floats we think is good, with the possible exceptions of float
161 (a few data gaps) and
125 (large data gaps).

Article showing preliminary results from Part I.

Part II: These RAFOS floats were manufactured at the Institut fuer Meereskunde Kiel with support of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 133). The trajectories were calculated by AINCO-Interocean, Madrid, Spain, as part of the EUROFLOAT project, sponsored by the European Commission.

These 5 floats, with a mission length of two years, were launched for EUROFLOAT in January 1997 by IFM Kiel.

One float failed to report, and float 214 had a large data gap, which resulted in the trajectory being divided into two files.

Comments on the data processing:

We do want to say that any potential irregularities seem in most cases small and will not affect the general pattern of the track and the analysis about it. This is because to get to this stage/file (rfc) we previously processed and analysed carefully the raw data from the satellite and went through the process of choosing the best sound source combination, highest correlation time of arrival (TOA) for the whole track or fragments of it. Of course our software (ARTOA, ARTRK and ARPRO developed by URI,IFM and AINCO; see our web page for details) also allows interpolation of data gaps.

Of course there is an element of subjectivity in the processing of the track but we have also tried to reduce that by making inter- comparisons of tracks starting from the original raw satellite data with our friends from Kiel and to our satisfaction the results were in most cases quite indistinguishable. The same things with tracks processed by different people at AINCO.

In the case of float 167 we have checked and we agree that the float has surfaced at the point where the temperature is 19.

In the rest of the cases we think/hope that the irregularities are small or short in time and do not affect the analysis. However and until we are able to do this double or triple check we do agree that a flag warning of these irregularities is worth putting just in case.

The partners of EUROFLOAT and proprietors of this data are:

Dr.John Gould (SOC,Southampton, UK)

Dr.Walter Zenk (IFM, Kiel, Germany)

Dr.Kevin Speer (IFREMER, Brest, France)

Dr.Ric Williams (University of Liverpool, UK)

Alan Cantos-Figuerola
Address: AINCO-Interocean
Costa Rica, 11 (1, A-26)
28016 Madrid
AINCO WWW: http://www.ainco.es/ainco