Turbulent dissipation rates (viscous and thermal), water temperature, salinity, velocity, and others collected from the research vessel THOMAS G. THOMPSON in the central tropical Pacific from 1987-03-26 to 1987-04-20 (NCEI Accession 0287031)

This dataset contains water temperature, salinity, velocity, turbulence, shear, stratification, and other parameters at the large-scale and fine-scale observed in a second Tropic Heat cruise at 0° / 140° W and a few other off-equator locations in the central tropical Pacific in March/April 1987. The R/V Thomas G. Thompson deployed the free-fall microstructure profiler MSP in 92 “drops” that mostly reached 1000m depth. The observations reach from the diurnally varying surface mixed layer, the likewise diurnally varying stratified shear layer below, the Equatorial Undercurrent and the Equatorial Intermediate Current. Turbulent mixing is quantified in viscous and thermal dissipation rates. Thermistors, shear probes and an acoustic current meter can reveal vertical wavenumber spectra from centimeters to decameters. Data are in ASCII format.