Profile and bottle data collected on the RV Melville (cruise Vancouver 06) from the Agulhas-South Atlantic Thermohaline Transport Experiment (ASTTEX) in the Atlantic Ocean from 20030102 to 20030115 (NCEI Accession 0074001)

Introduction:
The Agulhas-South Atlantic Thermohaline Experiment (ASTTEX) examined the fluxes of heat, salt and mass entering the South Atlantic ocean via the Agulhas Retroflection. The goal of the experiment was to provide a quantitative, multi-year Eulerian measurement of the strength and characteristic scales of Agulhas-South Atlantic mass and thermohaline fluxes, which contain a strong mesoscale component, resolving those fluxes on density horizons.

Methods:
The core of the ASTTEX field component was a 27-month deployment of sixteen moorings that monitored the transports of Indian Ocean water into the South Atlantic via the Agulhas Current at eddy-resolving resolution (70 - 80 km). The moored array consisted of twelve pressure sensor-equipped inverted echo sounders (PIES) three near-bottom acoustic current meters (ACMs), and one validation mooring equipped with six recording conductivity-temperature (CT) sensors and four vector averaging current meters (VACMs). All of the moorings were deployed along Topex-Poseidon/Jason satellite altimeter groundtrack 133. The mooring deployment and first hydrographic survey cruise (R/V Melville cruise Vancouver 06) were begun on January 2, 2003 and mooring recovery and second hydrographic cruise (RRS Discovery cruise 290) were completed on April 9, 2005. Hydrographic survey data include CTDO, XBT and XCTD profile data, and bottle samples of salinity and dissolved oxygen.

ASTTEX also included the large-scale analysis of regional sea surface height (SSH) anomaly fields during the field portion of the experiment as well as a long-term (12-year) analysis of Agulhas eddies in the SSH record (1992-2004). This component, spearheaded by Dr. Donna Witter of Kent State University, provided a large-scale, low-frequency context for the experiment. The SSH fields were derived from a combination of Topex-Poseidon and Jason-1 altimeter data.