ITP56 Data Description

The ITP profiler was configured to operate on a fast sampling schedule of 4 one-way profiles between 7 and 750 m depth each day. In the surface package, the GPS receiver was powered hourly to obtain locations hourly, and buoy temperature and battery voltage status were recorded.

The buoy drifted south with the Transpolar Drift for 6 months towards Fram Strait, passed through the strait and avoided the shallow Greenland continental shelf for another 6 months before transmissions ceased. After accelerating through Fram Strait on the ice, the drift speed rapidly slowed when the buoy was released from the ice floe (as indicated by buoy temperatures). Unfortunately, as explained in the Data Processing section, only down profiles were acquired in the Greenland Sea section, so these data are subject to smearing in the wake of the profiler.

The plots to the right are of the final, calibrated, edited data (as opposed to the raw data presented on the active instrument pages).

See the Data Products tab to the left for descriptions of the three levels (I, II, III) of data processing and to access all data.

ITP 56 data can also be found at the links below:

Level II hourly buoy location data in ASCII format: itp56rawlocs.dat

Level III 1-Hz processed profile data in MATLAB format: itp56cormat.tar.Z and itp56cormat.zip

Level III 1-db bin-averaged processed profile data in MATLAB format: itp56final.mat
Level III 1-db bin-averaged processed profile data in ASCII format: itp56final.tar.Z and itp56final.zip

Plot of buoy locations.

ITP56 temperature and salinity contours.

Composite plot of ITP temperature and salinity contours.