This is line A03 (ExpoCode 90CT40_1, with nominal sampling date 1993-09-11). The chief scientist was Tereschenkov of SOI, working aboard the Russian ship Multanovsky, undertaking a westward transect from the Mediterranean outflow region across to North America, with a change of heading in the last few dozen stations to run across the nominal Gulf Stream axis. The data flags follow the "WHP Bottle"convention, set by initializeFlagScheme,section-method() to "WHP bottle". This convention used to be described at the link https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/woce/woce_v3/wocedata_1/whp/exchange/exchange_format_desc.htm but that was found to fail in December 2020.

data(section)

Source

This is based on the WOCE file named a03_hy1.csv, downloaded from https://cchdo.ucsd.edu/cruise/90CT40_1, 13 April 2015.

Speculation on a timing error

In May 2022, it was discovered that the times in this dataset are not fully sequential, at two spots. This might be a reporting error. Station 41 has time listed as 1993-10-03T00:06:00 and that leads to a time reversal. However, if that time were actually on the day before, then the time reversal would vanish, and the inter-station timing of about 5 to 6 hours would be recovered. A similar pattern is seen at station 45. Of course, this hypothesis of incorrect recording is difficult to test, for data taken thirty years ago.

Examples

library(oce)
# Gulf Stream
data(section)
GS <- subset(section, 113 <= stationId & stationId <= 129)
GSg <- sectionGrid(GS, p = seq(0, 5000, 100))
plot(GSg, span = 1500) # increase span to show more coastline