On The Correlation Between Adcp And Ctd Data In The Faroe Current

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The eastward oriented Faroe Current, flowing north of the Faroe Islands, represents more than a third of the total Atlantic inflow towards the Arctic. A quite comprehensive ADCP data coverage of this current is today available making a good estimate og the total transport in the Faroe Current possible. But specific water mass transports are more difficult to estimate since this task requires hydrographic Temperature and Salinity (TS) information and the CTD data available in this region have a much coarser temporal resolution (3-6 sections a year) than the ADCP data do. An Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis is used to find the most predominant patterns of variation in the two types of data fields, and a good correlation is found between a specific TS pattern and a velocity pattern of variation. This link enables us to reconstruct the salient features in the TS-field on a daily time scale, and thereby reduce the variance in these fields to about one half. The effect of using this additional information on the TS-field instead of just using averages has been illustrated by calculating transports of Atlantic Water and while small differences (3%) have been found on longer time-scales (years), a significant effect (20%) is seen on monthly time-scales or shorter.