Thursday, December 20, 2018

DOI: 10.5067/SDRON-SURF0

The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the availability and first official release of the Saildrone Baja Field Campaign Dataset.  Saildrone is a wind and solar powered unmanned surface vehicle (USV) capable of long distance deployments and equipped with a suite of sensors providing high quality, georeferenced, multi-parameter surface ocean and atmospheric observations while transiting at typical speeds of 3-5 knots. The Saildrone Baja campaign was a 60-day cruise from San Francisco Bay along the US/Mexico coast to Guadalupe Island and back over the period 11 April to 11 June 2018. The single deployed saildrone carried a range of instruments that included a CTD, IR pyrometer, fluorometer, dissolved oxygen sensor, anemometer, barometer, and Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP).  Further information on the Saildrone platform and the scientific and data validation objectives of this Baja cruise are available at https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/Saildrone.  Support for the Saildrone Baja campaign was from the Schmidt Family Foundation, Saildrone, Inc., and NASA's Physical Oceanography Program (grant number 80NSSC18K0837).

The Saildrone Baja dataset is described and discoverable via the PO.DAAC data portal.   Both associated Saildrone surface measurement and ADCP data products are in netCDF4 file format with CF/ACDD standards compliant metadata.  Access to these data is via PO.DAAC’s public FTP site but preferentially via PODAAC Drive going forward given deprecation of PO.DAAC’s public FTP site.  The data are additionally accessible via OPeNDAP and PODAAC-WS.  Accompanying technical documentation includes the Saildrone Baja Cruise report.  This report is available online on the site together with data reader software.  Users are strongly encouraged to review the instrument calibration section of the cruise report and especially the information provided regarding limitations of the current version of the IR sensor data.

Citation: Mordy, C.W. et al Oceanography 30(2):113–115, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.230

Comments/Questions? Please contact podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov or visit the PO.DAAC Forum.

Important Information for Users:

NASA is in the process of deprecating the use of the FTP protocol for data and information access. PO.DAAC is pleased to offer PO.DAAC Drive as a robust FTP alternative for browsing and retrieving data at PO.DAAC (podaac-tools.jpl.nasa.gov/drive/). It offers file navigation and download through an interface served directly through your browser, and with a familiar look and feel. It also allows users to access data via a command line so that interactions can be easily scripted. The entire PO.DAAC archive can also be mounted to a local computer as a virtual data store.