Discrete Water Column Measurements

The Southeast Fisheries Science Center Mississippi Laboratories conducts standardized fisheries independent resource surveys in the Gulf of Mexico, South Atlantic, and U.S. Caribbean to provide abundance and distribution information to support regional and international stock assessments. Environmental profiles are acquired during all surveys and are averaged into one meter depth bins. The data are acquired with Sea-Bird SBE25 and SBE9 profilers equipped with water temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, beam transmittance, and fluorescence sensors. The data are processed with Sea-Bird software using a standard processing protocol.

To provide discrete water column environmental data during fisheries independent surveys in the Gulf of Mexico, South Atlantic, and U.S. Caribbean.

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Submitted data is reviewed by NMFS staff prior to data entry. Source data are validated against business rules when loaded into NMFS' Oracle database. Data input is reviewed against output on a routine basis to ensure quality.

Data resides in the laboratories’ centralized database (Oracle). Security patches are applied to the database and host environment immediately after their release. In addition, Security benchmarks are applied to the database and host environment. Data residing in the centralized database (Oracle) is backed up nightly. Backup sets are placed on the laboratories’ Networked Attached Storage (NAS) environment. Security patches/updates are immediately applied to the host environment. Data is stripped/mirrored using RAID 50 technology to protect data from disk failure. Nightly backups are preformed and files are written to magnetic tape and stored in an onsite / offsite location.

The data were acquired with Sea-Bird SBE25 and SBE9 profilers equipped with water temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, beam transmittance, and fluorescence sensors.

The data were processed with Sea-Bird software using the standard processing protocol developed by the National Marine Fisheries Service, Southeast Fisheries Science Center, Mississippi Laboratories. The data were processed with the Sea-Bird software modules Data Conversion, Filter, Loop Edit, Derive, Bin Average, and Strip. Water temperature, beam transmission, and derived salinity, dissolved oxygen (DO), DO percent saturation, and density were retained in the processed profiles.