Abstract:
The United Kingdom Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAFF)
Fisheries Laboratory, Lowestoft, UK, set up a network of coastal
observing sites in the early 1960s to provide information on sea water
temperatures close inshore around England and Wales. Sites were
selected on the basis of good exposure to the open sea as far from the
shoreline as practicable, in most cases from piers and
... breakwaters
between 50 and 200m from the shoreline. Sea water temperature
measurements were taken close to the time of high water at intervals
of three to four days. About 50 observing sites were involved in the
measuring programme. A few observing sites were already in existence
when the network started. For example, observations at the Seven
Stones and Varne Lightvessels go back as far as 1905. Results from
these measurements can be useful for effluent and cooling water intake
design studies.
The data set held by BODC covers the years from about 1960 onwards for
about 50 sites. The MAFF Fisheries Laboratory at Lowestoft has
recently set up a database for these data, supplemented by both
earlier data and also by data from non-MAFF sources.
AVAILABILITY: Data are available from BODC on magnetic tape, floppy
disk or via ftp over Internet. The data are also available from the
MAFF Fisheries Laboratory, Lowestoft, Suffolk, NR33 0HT, UK
[This description was derived from the BODC WWW pages.] 
