Joyce 9529607 Top to bottom hydrographic and current measurements will be carried out along two meridional lines at 66 W and 52 W in the North Atlantic as part of the "Atlantic Circulation and Climate Experiment" (ACCE) of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) hydrographic prgoram. The main objectives of the work are to obtain a quantitative description of the North Atlantic circulation and water mass distribution, and compare this state to similar basin-wide descriptions from two previous era: the International Geophysical Year (IGY) period of the late 1950s' and the early 1980s'. The overall goal is to characterize these snapshots in terms of climate variability, with the hope of furthering our understanding of the time scales and mechanisms of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system.
