An Enhanced PIRATA Data Set for Tropical Atlantic Ocean-Atmosphere Research

AOML oceanographers, Greg Foltz, Claudia Schmid, and Rick Lumpkin released a new and enhanced set of daily time series for the tropical Atlantic upper ocean temperature, salinity, and velocity, and standard meteorological fields. This new dataset (ePIRATA) is fully described in the newly accepted paper in Journal of Climate and can be accessed through the ePIRATA homepage.

The manuscript “An enhanced PIRATA data set for tropical Atlantic ocean-atmosphere research”, by Greg Foltz, Claudia Schmid, and Rick Lumpkin, was accepted for publication in Journal of Climate. It describes a new set of daily time series (ePIRATA) that is based on the measurements from 17 moored buoys of the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic (PIRATA). Parameters include quality-controlled and gap-filled upper-ocean temperature, salinity, and velocity, standard meteorological measurements, and the mixed layer heat and temperature budget components. Many of the time series are approaching 20 years in length. It is anticipated that ePIRATA will be useful for diagnosing the causes of tropical Atlantic intraseasonal to decadal SST variations and quantifying and reducing coupled model biases.