World Ocean Circulation Experiment

The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) was a component of the international World Climate Research Program, and aimed to establish the role of the World Ocean in the Earth's climate system. WOCE's field phase ran between 1990 and 1998, and was followed by an analysis and modelling phase that ran until 2002.

Goals

Two major goals were set for the campaign:

• Develop ocean models that can be used in climate models and collect the data necessary for testing them.
• Find the representativeness of the dataset for long-term behaviour and find methods for determining long-term changes in ocean currents.

Equipment

Data was collected using several methods:

• Traversing ocean transects by boat,
• moored and drifting buoys, one kind being the Autonomous Lagrangian Circulation Explorer (ALACE), which floats with the currents at a depth of 1 km and surfaces each week to send its position and data to a satellite,
• satellites: ERS–1 and ERS–2 (European), TOPEX/POSEIDON (US/French) (sea level and slope).

See also

• Global Ocean Data Analysis Project
• World Ocean Atlas

External links

• Access page to the WOCE data legacy at the National Oceanographic Data Center (US)
• Electronic Atlas of WOCE Data at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven
• WOCE page at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK)
• Searchable set of WOCE data, archived in the information system PANGAEA
• WOCE observations 1990-1998; a summary of the WOCE global data resource, WOCE International Project Office, WOCE Report No. 179/02., Southampton, UK. (pdf 18.9 MB)