Project WHOTS - WHOI Hawaii Ocean Time-series Station

Overview

In cooperation with the Hawaii Ocean Timeseries (HOT) project, the UOP Group has undertaken moored observations of surface forcing in the central Pacific. The primary intent of the WHOI HOT Station (WHOTS) is to provide long-term, high-quality air-sea fluxes as a coordinated part of the HOT program, and contribute to the HOT goals of observing heat, momentum, fresh water and chemical fluxes at a site representative of the oligotrophic North Pacific Ocean.

A moored surface buoy instrumented with a full complement of meteorological sensors was deployed in August, 2004 at about 22° 45´ North, 158° West. Subsurface instrumentation on the mooring is provided by the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), University of Hawaii under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The WHOTS mooring site is an OceanSITES Ocean Reference Station, and is World Meteorologcal Organization station number 58400 (formerly 51400).

The WHOTS Ocean Reference Station (ORS) is located north of the Hawaiian Island of Oahu. Instruments on the surface buoy record surface meteorology. Based on observations from 2004 to 2022, this wind rose provides a pictorial summary of the winds, summarizing wind direction and wind speed as a radial histogram. Direction is the direction the wind blows towards, so the wind rose is dominated by the East-Northeast trade winds blowing towards the West-Southwest.

The means of the surface meteorological variables from the WHOTS ORES over 2004-2022 are summarized in this table.