Expendable Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth System (XCTD) development Program

It was the objective of the XCTD development program to develop and test an expendable instrument system capable of providing ocean salinity to an overall accuracy of 0.05 parts per thousand. Table 1.1 is a summary of the design goals A workable XCTD system has emerged from the development work pursued to date. An XCTD probe subsystem design has been built and tested at sea that provides data from the surface to 1000 meters as required. A deck gear subsystem, with supporting host computer software has been demonstrated in the laboratory and at sea. The calibration techniques have been developed that permit accurate calibration of probes in prototype quantities.