Oceanographic water temperature, salinity, and velocity collected from Rogue River Mooring off the coast of Oregon from 2000-09-17 to 2004-09-08 (NCEI Accession 0137120)

A single mooring measuring temperature, salinity, and velocity was deployed on the 73 m isobath off the Oregon coast. The mooring was located at 42° 26.49' N, 124° 34.47' W, 11 km off Gold Beach, OR and was in the water from May 2000 to October 2004. The currents were sampled using an upward-looking RD Instruments 300 kHz broadband ADCP instrument burst-sampling 40 1-s pings every 15 minutes in 4-m depth bins. The taut-wire mooring had Seabird SBE-37IM MicroCAT temperature, conductivity, and pressure instruments at 20, 36, and 66 m sampling every 5 minutes and Seabird SBE-39 temperature only sensors at 26, 42, 50, and 58 m also sampling every 5 minutes. The MicroCATs represent the mid-depth and as close to the surface and bottom as possible given the mooring design. The 1.8 m (45) steel top sphere was moored at 17 m to avoid mooring motion induced by the extremely large (>12 m) surface waves which sometimes occur during winter storms off the Oregon coast. At tidal frequencies, typical blow-down at the top MicroCAT was less than 2 m with pitch and roll at the ADCP of less than 6 degrees. The worst-case mooring performance was during the severe winter storms of November and December 2002, when the blow-down was about 7 m and the pitch briefly hit 25 degrees. The mooring was recovered and redeployed every six months for four years. The early data revealed the need to sample closer to the surface than the original mooring design allowed. To facilitate this, a light-weight pennant consisting of a 30 cm plastic float on a thin spectra line was flown off the top of the 1.8 m sphere. A Star-Oddi Starmon mini temperature pod was taped to the line to sample temperature every 5 minutes at 6 m depth. This simple system worked surprisingly well starting with the fall 2001 deployment. Funding was provided by the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program.