120 - POINT ARGUELLO HARBOR OUTER, CA   Status:DECOMMISSIONED   Notice:10/18/1979 Station decommissioned Data set:

USACE "9 band" DATA FORMATS

As requested by the US Army Corps of Engineers, CDIP has special data formats for wave energy and direction. There are also CDIP specific formats for other data types such as wind and barometric pressure.

Wave energy is resolved to 9 bands (2-6,6-8,8-10,10-12,12-14,14-16,16-18,18-22,22+ seconds) in units of cm^2. (Please see the confidence interval disclaimer below).

The mean wave direction is resolved to 9bands (as above). Harvest Platform only has 6 period bands due to the large distance between sensors. Angles reported in the directional data are true compass headings towards which the waves are traveling at the location of the measuring instrument. Peak direction is given in the second column.

Wave energy confidence interval disclaimer
Estimates of wave energy contain a certain amount of statistical uncertainty. This uncertainty is function of wave frequency bandwidth not period bandwidth. Therefore, the energy estimates in the 9 period bands have varying confidence limits. In general, the statistical uncertainty gets progressively smaller as you go from the longer to the shorter wave period bands (which encompass increasingly larger frequency bandwidths).