INITIAL RESULTS FROM THE BERMUDA TESTBED MOORING PROGRAM

The Bermuda Testbed Mooring (BTM) has been deployed since June 1994 an d provides the oceanographic community with a deep-water platform for testing and intercomparing new instruments. The mooring is located abo ut 80 km southeast of Bermuda. Surface instruments collect meteorologi cal and spectral radiometric measurements from a buoy tower. Measureme nts at depth include: currents, temperature, conductivity, optical pro perties, and nitrate and trace element concentrations. Data have been sent to shore and to a nearby ship using a new inductive-link telemetr y system. The high temporal resolution, long-term data collected from the mooring provide important information concerning episodic and peri odic processes ranging in scale from minutes to years. For example, sh ort nitrate pulses and associated biological events have been observed in the mooring data sets, which were not seen in the periodic ship-co llected time-series data. Evaluation of undersampling and aliasing eff ects characteristic of infrequent sampling are also enabled with these data sets. The primary purposes of this report are to describe new sy stems and to illustrate early data resulting from the BTM program. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.