Quantification of the Effect of Water Temperature on the Fall Rate of Expendable Bathythermographs

Abstract

AbstractA very large portion of the historical information on ocean temperatures has been measured using expendable bathythermograph (XBT) devices. For decades, these devices provided the majority of global information. It is, therefore, important to quantify their accuracy and identify biases in this important historical dataset. Here, calculations are made of the influence of water temperature on the rate of descent of the XBT devices into the ocean waters. In colder regions, the larger viscosity of the water is expected to cause a greater drag force on the device, which would slow the descent. It was found through computational fluid dynamic models that the impact of temperature and viscosity on the probe descent is approximately 2.2% for water temperatures that range from 0° to 27°C. Probe-specific temperature-dependent fall rate equations were applied to 269 collocated XBT/conductivity–temperature–depth (CTD) measurements from two different research cruises. It was found that the probe-specific descent equations were an improvement over the uncorrected method. Next, in an effort to automate the process, the fall rate coefficients were related to the topmost measured temperature in the water column. With this relationship, comparisons were made between the probe-specific descent calculations and 2937 high-resolution XBT–CTD pairs. It was found that again, the new methodology outperformed the standard fall rate equation. The new method was also compared with an independent correction method that was previously published. It was found that both new methods were improvements upon the industry-standard fall rate calculation. Subsequent calculations using the top-100-m water temperature were performed and were found to be statistically insignificant compared to the proposed simplified method.