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University of Hawaii Sea Level Center Overview

A major component of the oceanography program at the University of Hawaii (UH) has been and continues to be the UH Sea Level Center (UHSLC), under the direction of Dr. Mark Merrifield. The UHSLC had its beginnings in the 1970's as the Pacific Sea Level Network. In the mid-1980's the TOGA Sea Level Center and the IGOSS, now known as the JCOMM, Sea Level Project in the Pacific were added and the network was expanded to the Indian Ocean, and in the early 1990's the WOCE center was established. This project now includes 3 distinct activities. These are the Indo-Pacific Sea Level Network (IPSLN), the JCOMM Sea Level Project in the Pacific (SLP-Pac), and the UHSLC research databases.

The IPSLN is an observational network of sea level gauges, most with satellite data telemetry, throughout the tropical portions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and is presently the largest open ocean sea level network in the world that is operated by a single group. The purpose of the IPSLN is to create and maintain an effective sea level observing system in the tropical portions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Station selection has been guided by the needs of ephemeral programs, such as TOGA or WOCE, as well as the needs of GLOSS. At present just over 300 sites have been designated as GLOSS sites; nearly all of the IPSLN stations fall into this category. The SLP-Pac produces and distributes within five weeks of the end of each month maps of Pacific Ocean sea surface topography variations. This activity was an early, and very successful, example of operational oceanography. Products include monthly maps of the Pacific sea level deviations from the long-term mean and as well as maps of the sea level anomalies from the long-term seasonal cycle that are corrected for atmospheric pressure anomalies. The SLP-Pac also produce quarterly updates of an index of the tropical Pacific upper layer volume and annual updates of indices of the ridge-trough system and equatorial currents for the Pacific Ocean

The UHSLC databases are the progression of work started by the TSLC and WOCE centers. The research quality database currently includes 330 sites with 3923 station-years of quality assured data. The GLOSS/CLIVAR "fast delivery" database currently includes 94 stations and focuses on processing sea level data from a globally distributed set of stations and making it available to users within three months of data collection. All of the above described data is available on the Internet.

The UHSLC also conducts research with the data collected by its subordinate activities. Areas of interest include: calibration of altimetry data with in situ sea level data, development of new cost-effective methods for collecting and maintaining sea level stations, tropical ocean dynamics, interannual and decadal climate fluctuations, impacts of climatic events on fisheries, and forecasting recruitment for fisheries.

For UHSLC data home page.