Abstract
Two west-to-cast temperature sections (∼2500 km in length) have been constructed from closely spaced (∼37 km) XBT measurements in the central South Pacific collected during Legs J and K of the Pacific GEOSECS Expedition. For these portions of track passing through the islands of the Tuamotu Archipelago, the main thermocline exhibited 50 m station-to-station variability on a scale too short to be resolved. In the open ocean away from these islands, the variability was smaller, 10–20 m, with only one 200 km scale eddy spatially resolved.
