An Enhanced PIRATA Dataset for Tropical Atlantic Ocean Atmosphere Research
AbstractThe Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic (PIRATA) provides measurements of the upper ocean and near surface atmosphere at 18 locations. Time series from many moorings are nearly 20 years in length. However, instrumental biases, data dropouts, and the coarse vertical resolutions of the oceanic measurements complicate their use for research. Here an enhanced PIRATA dataset (ePIRATA) is presented for the 17 PIRATA moorings with record lengths of at least seven years. Data in ePIRATA are corrected for instrumental biases, temporal gaps are filled using supplementary datasets, and the subsurface temperature and salinity time series are mapped to a uniform 5 m vertical grid. All original PIRATA data that pass quality control and that do not require bias correction are retained without modification, and detailed error estimates are provided. The terms in the mixed layer heat and temperature budgets are calculated and included, with error bars. As an example of ePIRATA's applicati.