A fast responding temperature measurement system for CTD applications

Abstract The temperature measurement system of the standard Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Neil Brown Instrument Systems conductivity-temperature-depth microprofiler consists of a platinum thermometer, which has stable calibration characteristics but response time of order 200 ms combined with a fast response thermistor designed to sample the higher frequency temperature fluctuations. The calibration characteristics and temporal response of the individual sensors relative to the conductivity cell were studied using a modified instrument which digitized these data channels separately. The relative responses of the individual sensors were found to be fairly well modeled by a single pole filter, but the response of the standard temperature signal, which is an analog combination of the two temperature sensor outputs, exhibited a complicated behavior. Several methods for obtaining a well-calibrated fast-responding temperature signal from the digitized platinum thermometer and thermistor records are discussed. Preliminary results suggest that thermohaline features on scales of less than a meter in the vertical are resolvable.