The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
Hawaii Ocean Timeseries (HOT) Site (WHOTS)
WHOTS is a coordinated part of HOT, and consists of a mooring that has been providing measurements of high-quality air-sea fluxes and the associated upper ocean response at Station ALOHA, about 100 km north of Oahu, Hawaii since August 2004. MORE
The WHOTS mooring is located at station ALOHA (a 6 nautical mile radius circle centered at 22 45'N, 158 W) in the central subtropical gyre of the North Pacific. The mooring has been in place for one-year periods since 2004 at a location that has been alternating between the eastern and southern edges of ALOHA (22 46.00'N, 157 53.90'W (Station 50), and 22 40.21'N, 157 57.00'W (Station 52) respectively)
The mooring consists of a surface buoy with meteorological instruments, and a mooring line with subsurface instrumentation anchored to a bottom weight nearly 5,000 m deep.
The buoy has an approximate swing radius of 2.2 nautical miles around the anchor position. The figure on the right is updated daily and shows the current position of the buoy relative to the it's anchor and to Station ALOHA.
The surface buoy is equipped with meteorological instrumentation measuring air and sea surface temperatures, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, incoming shortwave and longwave radiation, and precipitation. Complete surface meteorological measurements are recorded every minute, as required to compute air-sea fluxes of heat, freshwater and momentum. The system also transmits hourly averages of the surface meteorological variables via the Argos satellite system.
The mooring line is instrumented in order to collect time series of upper ocean temperatures, velocities, and salinities coincident with the surface forcing record.
This includes :
- Vector measuring current meters (VMCM)
- Conductivity, pressure and temperature recorders(Microcats and Seacats)
- Acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCP)