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The Bermuda Testbed Mooring (BTM)

Ocean Physics Laboratory

The Bermuda Testbed Mooring (BTM)

The Bermuda Testbed Mooring (BTM), funded by the National Science Foundation, has been deployed since June 1994 and provides the oceanographic community with a deep-water platform for developing, testing, calibrating, and intercomparing instruments. See our BTM Participant Information website for an Announcement of Opportunity to Participate in the BTM program. The mooring is located ~80 km southeast of Bermuda. Instruments are being used to collect meteorological and spectral radiometric measurements from a buoy tower. Subsurface measurements include currents, temperature, conductivity, several inherent and apparent optical properties, and nitrate and trace element concentrations. Data have been sent to shore and to a nearby ship using a new inductive-link telemetry system. The high temporal resolution, long-term data collected from the mooring provide important information concerning episodic and periodic processes ranging in scale from minutes to years. For example, short nitrate pulses or injections and associated biological events have been observed in the mooring data sets, but are not resolvable in the shipboard data set. Evaluation of undersampling and aliasing effects characteristic of infrequent sampling (i.e., monthly or often less frequent) are also enabled with these data sets.

BBSR
BTM Site

Mooring
BTM Mooring Diagram