The Oceanographic Data Acquisition Project (ODAP) was started in 1980 as an inter institutional program within Norway for the collection of wave, current and meteorological data from the Norwegian Shelf and the surrounding waters. The project is sponsored by the oil companies operating north of 62°and the Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. The effort put into ODAP has to date produced more than sixty data reports, six summary reports and several articles, conference proceedings and papers based upon data collected within the project. The data collected under the ODAP program are open and are stored at the Environmental Data Centre at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. The promising oil resources on Haltenbanken established over the last two years have resulted in an increased demand both for available data and for various types of analysis based upon the data sets from this area. Figure 1 is a map giving an overview of the measurements being carried out under the ODAP program in 1985. The cost of the project has typically been between 12 and 15 million Norwegian kroner per year.
As far as ODAP is concerned 1985 may be considered as a suitable break point for reviewing the measurement program and bringing some of the project results to the attention of the worldwide scientific and engineering community. During 1985 the main data acquisition effort in ODAP shifted northwards into the Barents Sea whilst measurements further south off mid-Norway were scaled down and rationalized. The measurements carried out under ODAP have included wave measurements by Waverider buoy near the coast and metocean directional wave buoys offshore; current metre measurements at various depths, both long term and short term; hydrographic measurements; and drifting buoy measurements both for mapping residual flow and obtaining meteorological data from areas with sparse coverage. These measurements are reviewed and discussed.
The data set from the ODAP project to have attracted most attention is undoubtedly that from Haltenbanken (65°N, 7.5°E), from where a unique data set exists consisting of several years of simultaneous current, meteorological and directional wave data. This information has been extensively utilized in number of research programs. The paper summarizes some of the results from the analysis, including studies of the wind-drift current, the directional wave climate and its presentation for design and operational purposes, extreme oceanographic events, ocean swell, current residuals and so on.
Two results arising from the project are briefly discussed blow. Firstly, it has been found that the contribution of the Atlantic swell to the wave climate offshore mid-Norway is more important than that in the North sea. The reason for this is that for waves propagated between Scotland, the Faeroe Islands and Iceland this region is more directly exposed to the North Atlantic. Swells with periods in the region of 20s and heights over 5 m have been measured. In fact, based on these observations, a research project is now in progress which aims at improving the modeling and forecasting of swell on the shelf.
Fig. 1 Overview of 1985 ODAP measurements (available in full paper)
