SWFSC Marine Mammal Survey, ORCAWALE 1996, Cruise 1604

NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC)

The 1996 Oregon, California and Washington Line-Transect Experiment (ORCAWALE) was designed to estimate the abundance of and to describe the distribution of dolphins, whales, and porpoises off the west coast of the United States out to 300 nautical miles. This survey was conducted by the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center aboard NOAA Ships David Starr Jordan and McArthur for a combined total of approximately 15,000
kilometers surveyed from mid July to early November 1996. This dataset provides the time-date and geographical coordinates, by species/stock, of all cetaceans detected during the survey, as well as the daily and intra-daily start and end points of the line-transect survey by the NOAA Ship McArthur.

The primary purpose of this survey was to estimate the abundance of and to describe the distribution of dolphins, whales, and porpoises off the west coast of the United States out to 300 nautical miles.

[2021-04-12] Updated with additional attributes.

SWFSC MMTD Cruise Number: 1604
Perpendicular distance will be released upon permission by the contributor. Please contact the contributor if needed.

Attribute descriptions for effort data:
dist: Length of the segment (km)
Mode: Effort mode type (C = closing mode; P = passing mode)

Overview

This section explains attributes included in the original dataset. OBIS-SEAMAP restricts the attributes available to the public to date/time, lat/lon and species names/counts only. Should you need other attributes described here, you are encouraged to contact the data provider.

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
All attributes are included in the downloadable file (CSV or ESRI File Geodatabase) for "Complete Set of Dataset".

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
event	Event code. S = cetacean sighting, t = sea turtle sighting, p = pinniped sighting
datetime	Date and time of sighting (local time)
lat	Latitude (decimal degrees) of vessel when sighting was made
lon	Longitude (decimal degrees) of vessel when sighting was made
cruise	SWFSC Marine Mammal and Turtle Divison Cruise number
sightno	Sighting number (within Cruise)
nsp	Number of species observed in the sighting
mixed	TRUE for a multi-species sighting (nSp >= 2); FALSE otherwise (nSp = 1)
spcode	Species code
sp_tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
gsspbest	The mean of all observers
gssphigh	The mean of all observers
gssplow	The mean of all observers
perpdistkm	Perpendicular distance (km) to sighting from trackline; Available upon permission.
bft	Beaufort sea state, as assessed by looking upswell with the naked eye
swellhght	Average swell height from trough to crest of typical swells (estimated in feet, by eye)
vis	A measure of air/atmospheric clarity only, as affected by observational conditions such as fog, rain, etc.
groupsize_sightno	Running count ID of all cetacean groups recorded
groupsize_count	Number of observers that provided a group size estimate
groupsize_count_obs	Number of unique observer codes per sighting for S events
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP