26 Years of Mooring Data from Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary

Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary (OCNMS) on the northwestern edge of Washington has maintained oceanographic moorings measuring surface and subsurface water properties at five cross-shelf lines from 2000 to present. Temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, water velocity, and pressure are measured offshore of Cape Elizabeth, Kalaloch, Teahwhit Heat, Cape Alava, and Makah Bay, with varying availability depending on location and year. The moorings collect data from late spring to late fall on the 15-meter and 27- or 42-meter isobaths (the Kalaloch mid-depth mooring is at 27 meters depth). Moorings have also been deployed at 50 meters at Kalaloch; 65 meters at Cape Alava, Teahwhit Head, and Cape Elizabeth; and 100 meters at Cape Alava during some years. Temperature measurements occur at 5-10 meter intervals throughout the water column at all locations, while the other variables are measured near the surface and/or bottom. 

This dataset includes multiple NetCDF files with data and quality flags for each OCNMS mooring site. The quality flags are defined by the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Quality-Assurance/Quality Control of Real-Time Oceanographic Data (QARTOD). The site name convention is the geographic location abbreviation followed by the water depth, in meters, at the mooring (Makah Bay: MB015 and MB042; Cape Alava: CA015, CA042, CA065, and CA100; Teahwhit Head: TH015, TH042, and TH065; Kalaloch: KL015, KL027, and KL050; Cape Elizabeth: CE015, CE042, and CE065). The data are organized in directories as follows: "Hourly_Processed_Files" contains hourly-averaged temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, eastward velocity, northward velocity, and pressure and the corresponding quality flags for each variable at all available depths from 2000–2025; "Record_Means" contains record means computed using all available years of data; "Raw_Files" contains the data before computing averages and applying quality flags; and "CSV_Files" contains plain-text ASCII comma-separated value files for each variable at each mooring containing all hourly values with “pass” or “suspect” flags.