This dataset comprises hydrographic data profiles, collected by a conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) sensor package, during April - May 1990 along a transect in the eastern Atlantic, incorporating the Azores-Biscay Rise, Western Madeira Rise, Saharan Seamounts and Cape Verde Terrace. A complete list of all data parameters are described by the SeaDataNet Parameter Discovery Vocabulary (PDV) keywords assigned in this metadata record. The data were collected by the University of Edinburgh Department of Geology and Geophysics as part of the Biogeochemical Ocean Flux Study (BOFS).

The data set comprises hydrographic, biogeochemical and biological data, including measurements of temperature, salinity and attenuance, plus concentrations of parameters such as nutrients, pigments, urea, hydrocarbons, sedimentation flux, sulphur and dissolved carbon. Analyses of bacterial, zooplankton and phytoplankton communities were also undertaken. The oceanographic data were supplemented by measurements of surface meteorological parameters. Data were collected across three repeated sections: one along the Gulf of Oman; a section at 67deg East from 8 to 14.5deg North; and a major section from 8deg North, 67 deg East to the coast of Oman. Other one-off sections were also traversed in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman areas. Measurements were collected during two cruises: one between 27 August and the 4 October 1994 and the other between the 16 November and the 19 December 1994. Sections were covered by underway surface ocean measurements (one minute sampling of multiple parameters providing some 5 million measurements) complemented by a total of 21 CTD/water-bottle stations, 14 of which were repeated. ARABESQUE was organised by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory of NERC's Centre for Coastal and Marine Sciences and involved the University of Wales, Bangor; Queen's University of Belfast; University of East Anglia; University of Edinburgh; University of Newcastle; the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Canada; the Max Planck Institute for Limnology, Germany and the Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. Data management support for the project was provided by the British Oceanographic Data Centre. All data collected as part of the project were lodged with BODC who had responsibility for assembling, calibrating, quality controlling and fully documenting the data. BODC checked for instrument spikes or malfunction, values beyond the calibration range, unreasonable ratios of chemical constituents and unreasonable deviations from climatological means. Data were assembled into a relational database, complete with supporting documentation and a user manual. The full data set has been published by BODC on CD-ROM complete with user interface.

The dataset contains physical, biological and chemical oceanographic measurements, and meteorological data. Hydrographic measurements include temperature, salinity, current velocities, attenuance, dissolved oxygen and fluorescence, while water samples were analysed for concentrations of nutrients, pigments, suspended particulates, metals and halocarbons. Samples were also collected for phytoplankton and zooplankton analyses, while results from production experiments are also included in the data set. These oceanographic data are supplemented by surface meteorological measurements. The data were collected at 357 sites in the NE Atlantic, 308 of which are from cruises centering on 20 W, 47 to 60 N, 16 from the Cape Verde Islands and 33 in a coccolithophore bloom just south of Iceland. Measurements were taken from 3 cruises in 1989, 6 cruises in 1990 and 2 cruises in 1991. The data were collected via (i) underway sampling (SeaSoar Undulating Oceanographic Recorder (UOR), hull-mounted acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP), meteorology and surface ocean parameters) of which there are 793430 records at 30 second intervals from 11 cruises and (ii) discrete sampling (conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) and expendable bathythermograph (XBT) casts, bottle stations, net hauls, productivity incubations, stand alone pump (SAP) and sediment trap deployments, cores) of which there are 2215 deployments/experiments. The aim of the Biogeochemical Ocean Flux Study (BOFS) Community Research Project was to study the role of oceans in the global cycling of carbon. The data were collected and supplied by UK participants in the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS). The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) had responsibility for calibrating, processing, quality controlling and documenting the data and assembling the final data set. The underway data are stored as time series for each cruise merged with the navigation data. The data are fully quality controlled. Checks were made for instrument malfunction, fouling, constant values, spikes, spurious values, calibration errors and baseline corrections. The discrete data are stored in a relational database (Oracle RDBMS), mainly as vertical profiles and are uniquely identified by a combination of deployment number and depth.