A joint international investigation in the Skagerrak area, the Skagerrak Experiment (SKAGEX) was carried out from spring 1990 to spring 1991. Four field phases (SKAGEX I-IV) were carried out, and 17 research ships from 7 countries participated with the following objectives:
- to identify and quantify the various water masses entering and leaving the Skagerrak Area, and their variations over time;
- to investigate the mechanisms that drive the circulation in the area, and its links with biological processes;
- to investigate the pathways of contaminants through the Skagerrak.
The leader of the Project was B. Dybern; the ICES Data Centre acted as the project data centre, collating most of the oceanographic data from 2896 bottle/CTD profiles. This data set is a copy from the original data at ICES, published in 2007 via the information system PANGAEA.
The Global River Discharge (RivDIS) data set contains monthly discharge measurements for 1018 stations located throughout the world. The period of record varies widely from station to station, with a mean of 21.5 years. These data were digitized from published UNESCO archives by Charles Voromarty, Balaze Fekete, and B.A. Tucker of the Complex Systems Research Center (CSRC) at the University of New Hampshire.
River discharge is typically measured through the use of a rating curve that relates local water level height to discharge. This rating curve is used to estimate discharge from the observed water level. The rating curves are periodically rechecked and recalibrated through on-site measurement of discharge and river stage.