Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory Oceanographic Data

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has built the Martha's
Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO) near South Beach in
Edgartown, Massachusetts. The project was initiated by
scientists in the Coastal and Ocean Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
(COFDL) at WHOI, who will use the observatory to study coastal
atmospheric and oceanic processes.

Data from the observatory are downloaded from the shore lab
every twenty minutes: 5, 25 & 45 minutes after the
hour. They are processed to provide burst averaged statistics,
with the most current data presented on the MVCO home
page. Summary files of the oceanographic data are provided in
the OcnDat_s files. Historical burst averaged data can be
retrieved via a web interface (JGOFS format) or anonymous ftp
(mvcodata.whoi.edu).

The time (Yday) is GMT (UTM) at the start of the burst, where
1.5 represents noon on January 1.

Anonymous ftp ("ftp://mvcodata.whoi.edu/pub/mvcodata/data/")
access provides ascii flat files including year-to-date data in
files named YYYY_InstID.CNN (eg., 2002_Campmt.C03) or data from
each day as YYYYyday_InstID.CNN (eg., 2002122_Campmt.C03). The
Yday 1.5 represents noon on January 1. Data are available to
download. The user must navigate to the desired Instrument_ID
(eg., Campmt_s) and the desired year (eg., 2000). Text files
and header files define the contents of these data files. The
year-to-date files can be read using one of the example Matlab
m-files. The web-interface
("http://mvcodata.whoi.edu/jg/dir/mvco/") provides methods to
subset the data. Retrieved ascii data will contain a header at
the top. The web-interface also provides interactive graphics
(Simple X-Y plotting).