Time-series photographs of the sea floor in western Massachusetts Bay: June 1997 to June 1998

This report presents time-series photographs of the sea floor obtained from an instrumented tripod deployed at Site A in western Massachusetts Bay (42° 22.6' N., 70? 47.0' W., 30 m water depth, from June 1997 through June 1998. Site A is approximately 1 km south of an ocean outfall that began discharging treated sewage effluent from the Boston metropolitan area into Massachusetts Bay in September 2000. Time-series photographs and oceanographic observations were initiated at Site A in December 1989 and are anticipated to continue to September 2005. This is the first in a series of reports planned to summarize and distribute these images in digital form. The objective of these reports is to enable easy and rapid viewing of the photographs and to provide a medium-resolution digital archive. The images, obtained every 4 hours, are presented as a movie (in .avi format, which may be viewed using an image viewer such as QuickTime or Windows Media Player) and as individual images (.tif format). The images provide time-series observations of changes of the sea floor and near-bottom water properties.