Ofu, American Samoa, wave and water level data, 2020

The RBR solo D|wave instruments operated in burst-sampling mode; they measured pressure as 4096 samples collected at 2 Hz every hour (approximately 34-min long bursts). Raw data from each instrument were exported to ASCII text files using the manufacturers software, RBR Ruskin v2.20.4, on a Personal Computer running Windows 10 Enterprise. Exported data were QA/QC’d in Matlab R2020a and exported to netCDF using Python 3.9. Data records were trimmed to a uniform start time chosen according to the earliest instrument deployment; as a result, some records still retain some out-of-water periods. The raw pressure readings include the pressure from both the overlying water and the atmosphere, and therefore must be corrected to remove the atmospheric pressure. Data on atmospheric pressure were downloaded from a local weather station maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (American Samoa Observatory (SMO) on the northeastern tip of Tutuila Island, American Samoa, https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/smo/). The data on barometric pressure were interpolated to the burst interval of the pressure measurements, and a single value was removed from each burst.

Files are named with a convention that uses a 11-digit alpha-numeric code. The first three characters for this dataset are all 'OFU' for the experiment name; the fourth and fifth positions represent the calendar year in which the first data point in the file was taken (20, 2020); the sixth, seventh and eighth characters are an alphanumeric code for the site name (W03, W04 etc.); the ninth and tenth characters represent the instrument position on the platform, where 01 is the top-most. The eleventh character ‘b’ indicates that these are the raw burst data. The ‘-cal’ suffix indicates the processing level (‘cal’, calibrated, or translated into scientific units, provisional status).