• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.49-61
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• 2021

The repeated shipboard measurements that have been conducted by the National Institute of Fisheries Science (NIFS) for more than a half century, provide the valuable long-term hydrographic data with high spatial-temporal resolution. However, this unprecedent dataset has been rarely used for oceanic climate sciences because of its reliability issue. In this study, temporal variability of salinity error in the NIFS data was quantified by means of extremely small variability of salinity in the deep layer of the south-western East Sea, in order to contribute to studies on long-term variability of the East Sea. The NIFS salinity errors estimated on the isothermal surfaces of 1℃ have a remarkable temporal variation, such as ~0.160 g/kg in the year of 1961~1980, ~0.060 g/kg in 1981~1994,~0.020 g/kg in 1995~2002, and ~0.010 g/kg in 2003~2014 on average, which basically represent bias error. In the recent years, even though the quality of salinity has been improved, there still remain relatively large bias errors in salinity data presumably due to failure of salinity sensor managements, especially in 2011, 2013, and 2014. On the contrary, the salinity in the year of 2012 was very accurate and stable, whose error was estimated as about 0.001 g/kg comparable to the salinity sensor accuracy. Thus, as long as developing proper data quality control procedures and sensor management systems, I expect that the NIFS shipboard hydrographic data could have good enough quality to support various studies on ocean response to climate variabilities. Additionally, a few points to improve the current NIFS shipboard measurements were suggested in the discussion section.

• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.56-76
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• 2024

We for the first time made a successful longest continuous sectional observation in the East Sea by an underwater glider during 95 days from September 18 to December 21 2020 in the Korea along the 106 Line (129.1 °E ~ 131.5 °E at 37.9 °N) of the regular shipboard measurements by the National Institute of Fishery Science (NIFS) and obtained twelve hydrographic sections with high spatiotemporal resolution. The glider was deployed at 129.1 °E in September 18 and conducted 88-days flight from September 19 to December 15 2020, yielding twelve hydrographic sections, and then recovered at 129.2 °E in December 21 after the last 6 days virtual mooring operation. During the total traveled distance of 2550 km, the estimated deviation from the predetermined zonal path had an average RMS distance of 262 m. Based on these high-resolution long-term glider measurements, we conducted a comparative study with the bi-monthly NIFS measurements in terms of spatial and temporal resolutions, and found distinguished features. One is that spatial features of sub-mesoscale such as sub-mesoscale frontal structure and intensified thermocline were detected only in the glider measurements, mainly due to glider's high spatial resolution. The other is the detection of intramonthly variations from the weekly time series of temperature and salinity, which were extracted from glider's continuous sections. Lastly, there were deviations and bias in measurements from both platforms. We argued these deviations in terms of the time scale of variation, the spatial scale of fixed-point observation, and the calibration status of CTD devices of both platforms.