Preliminary result of Central Equatorial Pacific Ocean Tomography Experiment
Hidetoshi Fujimori, Toshiaki Nakamura, Tomoyuki Kanaizumi, Iwao Nakano, (Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, Yokosuka, Japan)
Gang Yuan (International Pacific Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii)
Bruce Howe (Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, USA)
JAMSTEC and APL made and started a Joint program to set the acoustic tomography system to measure a shallow overturning which is thought to be related to interdecadal climate variability (Gu and Philander, Science 1997) as well as to measure the heat storage variation due to El Nino for two years (1998-2000). The acoustic tomography system was successfully deployed by the JAMSTEC tomography team in the Central Equatorial Pacific Region (0.5 N to 13.6 N, 177.7 E to 172.1 E) in early January, 1999. This system has a capability to transfer measured data for the experiment sites to the Land Station in real-time in addition to store it in the internal HDD. These transferred data is to be analyzed to reconstruct temperature and current fields in the region using the tomographic inverse method. The preliminary result of temperature and current fileds at the early stage of the tomographic experiment will be presented and discussed.