Florida Institute of Oceanography (FIO) technicians, located at the
Keys Marine Laboratory on Long Key in the Florida Keys, make weekly trips
to five of the six SEAKEYS/C-MAN stations to maintain the oceanographic
instruments. The Dry Tortugas station is visited once a month. During
these trips, the technicians measure sea temperature and salinity with
calibrated instruments and clean the sensors. The calibrated measurements
are compared with those of the in situ measurements to determine
the amount of instrument drift, and for correction of the raw data at a
later time.
Data sent hourly from the instruments at the SEAKEYS/C-MAN stations are received at Wallups Island, VA, via a GOES satellite. They are then stored as raw data files for several days. During the period of temporary storage, the data are downloaded to a workstation at NOAA/AOML, where they are reformatted into email messages and Web pages. Historical data are reformatted for access via a high-performance database server over the Web.
Page Updated 3/2/98