The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) operates a DAS on a number of vessels, both those operated by NIWA, and other vessels of opportunity. The data collected by the DAS varies considerably, but typically includes vessel geographic position, meteorological information, vessel heading and speed, water property measurements, locations of deployed instruments, depth of the water beneath the vessel, etc. These data can be stored by a DAS in a variety of formats, ranging from simple ASCII files through to self-describing binary formats such as NetCDF. The interval between measurements from the various instruments can vary from 0.1 seconds to hours. In general, a DAS stores low volume, regularly sampled data rather than data from high volume, high rate instruments. The extent of data collection includes waters within the New Zealand 200 n. mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the Tasman Sea, waters from New Zealand across to South America, and Antarctic waters.