The ESI/KeckII Damped Lya Abundance Database

Abstract

This paper presents chemical abundance measurements for 37 damped Lya systems at z>2.5 observed with the Echellette Spectrograph and Imager on the KeckII telescope. We measure the HI column densities of these damped systems through Voigt profile fits to their Lya profiles and we implement the apparent optical depth method to determine ionic column densities. Figures and tables of all relevant data are presented. A full analysis of the chemical enrichment history described by these observations will be presented in a future paper. This dataset is also valuable for efficiently planning future echelle observations and for rough abundance pattern analyses. We aim to make this entire data set public within three years of this publication.