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Tabulations of ocean tide at St. Helena, 1826-1827

This dataset contains tabulations of the heights and times of tidal high and low water at St. Helena from 1 October 1826 to 31 October 1827. The tide was recorded by an instrument designed by Manuel Johnson, a future President of the Royal Astronomical Society, while waiting for an observatory to be built. The tabulations in this dataset were obtained by inspection of photographs of Johnson's tabulation sheets that are held in the archive RGO 6/500 in the Royal Greenwich Observatory collection at Cambridge University Library. It is an important record in the history of tidal science, as the only previous measurements at St. Helena had been those made by Nevil Maskelyne in 1761, and there were to be no other systematic measurements until the late 20th century. Johnson’s tide gauge, of a curious but unique design, recorded efficiently the height of every tidal high and low water for at least 13 months, in spite of requiring frequent re-setting. These heights compare very reasonably with a modern tidal synthesis based on present-day tide gauge measurements from the same site. Johnson’s method of timing is unknown, but his calculations of lunar phases suggest that his tidal measurements were recorded in Local Apparent Time. Unfortunately, the recorded times are found to be seriously and variably lagged by many minutes. Johnson’s data have never been fully published, but his manuscripts have been safely archived and are available for inspection at Cambridge University. His data have been converted to computer files as part of this study for the benefit of future researchers. This dataset supports the paper “Cartwright, D.E.; Woodworth, P.L.; Ray, R.D.. 2017 Manuel Johnson's tide record at St. Helena. History of Geo- and Space Sciences”. Richard Ray (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and Philip Woodworth (National Oceanography Centre) modified and added figures to David E. Cartwright’s original draft paper and sections of text have been updated, but otherwise the paper is as he intended it. This work was undertaken when Philip Woodworth was an Honorary Research Fellow at the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool in receipt of an Emeritus Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Part of this work was funded by UK Natural Environment Research Council National Capability funding.

Simple

Alternate title
British Oceanographic Data Centre record 1048sthelenatabulation
Date (Publication)
2018-05-18
Date (Creation)
2017-03-20
Date (Revision)
2021-04-21
Identifier
http://www.bodc.ac.uk/ / EDMED6590
Owner
  National Oceanography Centre (Liverpool) - Unknown ( Unknown )
Joseph Proudman Building, 6 Brownlow Street , Liverpool , Merseyside , L3 5DA , United Kingdom
+44 (0)151 795 4800
http://noc.ac.uk
Originator
  National Oceanography Centre (Liverpool) - Unknown ( Unknown )
Joseph Proudman Building, 6 Brownlow Street , Liverpool , Merseyside , L3 5DA , United Kingdom
+44 (0)151 795 4800
http://noc.ac.uk
Custodian
  British Oceanographic Data Centre - Director
Joseph Proudman Building , 6 Brownlow Street , Liverpool , Merseyside , L3 5DA , United Kingdom
https://www.bodc.ac.uk/
Distributor
  British Oceanographic Data Centre - Director
Joseph Proudman Building , 6 Brownlow Street , Liverpool , Merseyside , L3 5DA , United Kingdom
https://www.bodc.ac.uk/
Maintenance and update frequency
asNeeded As needed
INSPIRE themes
  • Elevation
MEDIN metadata record availability
  • Marine Environmental Data and Information Network
  • Natural Environment Research Council Designated Data Centres
Vertical Coverages
  • unknown
SeaDataNet PDV
  • Sea level
Access constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
No limitations apply
Other constraints
Data are freely available
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
No conditions apply
Spatial representation type
Text, table
Metadata language
EnglishEnglish
Topic category
  • Elevation
  • Oceans
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Geographic identifier
South Atlantic Ocean

Date (Revision)
2021-10-28

Begin date
1826-10-01
End date
1827-10-31
Unique resource identifier
urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG::4326
Codespace
OGP
Distribution format
  • Delimited ()

  • Text or Plaintext ()

OnLine resource
Published dataset - doi:10.5285/4b2b52d7-ffd9-2473-e053-6c86abc0103b

Cartwright D.E.; Woodworth P.L.; Ray R.D. (2017). Tabulations of ocean tide at St. Helena, 1826-1827. British Oceanographic Data Centre - Natural Environment Research Council, UK. doi:10/b4p4

Hierarchy level
dataset Dataset

Conformance result

Date (Publication)
2010-12-08
Explanation
BODC protocols are based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model enabling BODC to iterate towards compliance with the on-going evolution and development of community requirements including FAIR (Findable,Accessible,Interoperable,Reusable), TRUST (Transparency, Responsibility, User community, Sustainability, Technology) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics). Data managers quality assure submissions and assemble the metadata necessary for curation. Submissions (as received) are placed in a long-term accession and stored in triplicate across multiple sites. Appropriate data are transferred into a standard internal format with source variable names mapped to controlled vocabularies, documentation assembled, and metadata loaded into BODC databases. Access to these data is through direct request, the BODC website and through partner repositories such as SeaDataNet. Access control is attained by assigning a data policy to each set of data and this policy is used to administer access when data are requested. Discovery metadata is aligned with EU INSPIRE (through MEDIN) and SeaDataNet community standards. Data are converted to open community formats including Ocean Data View ASCII and SeaDataNet NetCDF, with data described using terms from the NERC vocabulary server. BODC submission agreements are documented on the BODC website and customer service is assured with a dedicated requests team that serve data following local regulations including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2018 and Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) 2004.
Pass
Yes
Statement

This dataset contains tabulations obtained by inspection of photographs held in the archive RGO 6/500 in the Royal Greenwich Observatory collection at Cambridge University Library. The data have been compared with a modern generated tidal analysis. This dataset was passed on to the British Oceanographic Data Centre to be entered into the Published Data Library (PDL) and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

Instrument(s) used to collect data: sea level recorders.

File identifier
f7e5ac8d01665df1b7b3374333b35900 XML
Metadata language
EnglishEnglish
Hierarchy level
dataset Dataset
Date stamp
2021-12-20T06:31:16
Metadata standard name
MEDIN
Metadata standard version
3.1.1
Point of contact
  British Oceanographic Data Centre - Polly Hadžiabdić ( Head of the BODC Requests Team )
Joseph Proudman Building , 6 Brownlow Street , Liverpool , Merseyside , L3 5DA , United Kingdom
https://www.bodc.ac.uk/
 
 

Overviews

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W
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Keywords


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