PacWave Site Observations

The PacWave Site Observations submission contains raw and near-real-time meteorological and oceanic measurements at the PacWave wave energy test site. PacWave is an open-ocean testing facility operated by Oregon State University, located off the coast of Newport, Oregon. The test site is split into two areas, aptly named PacWave North (PWN) and PacWave South (PWS). PWN is an off-grid test site located 2 nm offshore with a water depth of 45-55 m, located between 44.68 & 44.70 degrees North and 124.12 & 124.15 degrees West. PWS is a grid-connected test site located 6 nm offshore with a water depth of 65-78 m, located between 44.55 & 44.58 degrees North and 124.21 & 124.24 degrees West.

There are several METocean instrumentation platforms that have been deployed at both sites:
- FLOATr (Fixed Location Ocean and Atmosphere Tracking) buoys
- Sofar Spotter wave buoys
- CDIP WaveRider buoys
- Nexsens meteorological buoys
- Nortek Signature250 bottom lander
- CRAB passive acoustic monitoring system

These platforms have been deployed at both sites with varying deployment schedules. Deployments are typically named with a 3 digit number in chronological order. Processed data are provided in netCDF4 format based on Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) standards. Note, minimal quality control has been conducted on these data.

The FLOATr buoys provide meteorological measurements of wind speed and direction, air temperature and pressure, shortwave radiation (light). An onboard CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth) sensor (Seabird SBE 37-SM MicroCAT) provides measurements of water temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. Down-looking ADCPs (RDI Workhorse 600 kHz) installed on the FLOATr buoys provide observations of water velocity.

Telemetered data from the FLOATr buoys are stored in CSV files with the following filenames:
- ADCP.dat (subsampling of ADCP binary data - Teledyne Sentinel Workhorse 300khz)
- Airmar_buffer.dat (Airmar WX200 instrument serial data buffer)
- gga.dat (gps Degree & Decimal Minutes)
- hdg.dat (magnetic heading, deviation, variation)
- hdt.dat (heading true)
- mda.dat (meteorological composite)
- Met.dat (multiple data values from various sources (instruments, nmea strings) into a single data table) - best for quick data checks
- mwv_r.dat (calculated mean wind velocity_relative)
- mwv_t.dat (calculated mean wind velocity_true)
- Ocean.dat (CTD data - Seabird SBE16, temp, conductivity/salinity, 02)
- zda.dat - (time and date)

The wave buoys (Spotter, Nexsens, WaveRider) provide measurements of standard and directional wave statistics as well as additional metocean variables such as sea surface temperature. Telemetered wave statistics are stored in .json format, as pulled from the cloud APIs, and are processed into netCDF4 format. Raw data from the Spotter SD cards is uploaded after each deployment recovery in a netCDF4 format. Data from the WaveRider buoys can be found on the UCSD CDIP website.

Bottom deployments of Nortek Signature250 ADCPs are deployed in dual profile mode, measuring both surface waves and water velocity. Data are collected only after recovery of the bottom lander, typically every 6 months. These data are provided in the raw native ADCP format (.ad2cp and .avgd.ad2cp). NetCDF4 files containing the surface elevation measurements are created from the larger .ad2cp file, which can be then used to calculate wave statistics, while netCDF4 files containing water velocity are created from the .avgd.ad2cp file.

The Coastal Real-time Acoustic Buoy (CRAB) is a passive acoustic instrumentation system that collects passive acoustic measurements on the seafloor and telemeters data on-shore in near-real-time. The hydrophones are controlled via a WISPR system onboard the bottom lander, which sends data to the surface buoy at a specified interval to send to a shore-side server. Raw acoustic pressure data are stored in .dat files in the native WISPR format, and processed netCDF4 files contain calibrated sound pressure spectral density level and sound pressure levels.

Processed and Raw data can be accessed via the "PacWave Observation Data on AWS" resource below. For links to specific datasets see the "PacWave Data Structure Table" resource.