WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology

Topics

• Access
• Description
• Parameters
• Coverage, spatial and temporal resolution
• Data quality
• Contact person
• References
• Data citation and License

Access

UNRESTRICTED:

• View WOCE data at LAS
• Get WOCE data via FTP
• Access WOCE data via OPeNDAP

RESTRICTED: This link to the data set is only available for a restricted user group.  The data set is only accessible in CEN/MPI net or accessible from external nets with a customer account.  Please contact ICDC if you would like to access this data from outside the network.

• Data access via file system: /data/icdc/ocean/woce_climatology

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Description

The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) was a part of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). Nearly 30 countries contributed resources to make unprecedented in-situ and satellite observations of the global ocean between 1990 and 1998. The WOCE Hydrographic Program (WHP) encompassed a range of physical and chemical measurements collected from research vessels mainly by means of Conductivity/Temperature/Depth (CTD) profilers and rosette water samplers. The WHP One-Time Survey provided high-quality global coverage of basin-crossing ocean sections, along which temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nutrients, CO2 parameters, CFCs and other parameters were measured.

The WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology (Gouretski and Koltermann, 2004, see references) provides the basis for all maps of the WOCE Atlantic Atlas at ICDC. This climatology consists of optimally analyzed gridded fields of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and nutrients with 0.5-degree spatial resolution. The original quality controlled set of vertical property profiles includes both the WOCE hydrographic data and selected historical data after 1970, in order to fill areas between the WOCE sections. In a deviation to the NODC global climatologies (Levitus et al., 2009), optimal interpolation was performed on density surfaces. This allows to avoid production of artificial water masses in the gridded data and results in sharper horizontal gradients. Another important feature of the WGHC is the hydrostatic stability of the climatoligic density profiles.

The WGHC ocean climatology was used as the data basis for the calculation of the new international thermodynamical Equation of sea water (IOC, SCOR and IAPSO, 2010). All atlas maps (Postscript-files) have been produced by Viktor Gouretski. The Adobe-Illustrator files have been manually edited by Jacqueline Sommerfeld from Alfred Wegener Institute. 

Last update of data set at ICDC: 2010

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Parameters

Parameters of the WOCE data set

Name	Unit
Salinity	psu
Temperature	°C
Oxygen content	ml / l
Silicate content	µmol / kg
Neutral density	kg / m3
Potential density	kg / m3
Nitrate	µmol / kg
Phosphate	µmol / kg

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Coverage, spatial and temporal resolution

Period and temporal resolution:

• 1990 - 1998; selected data from several earlier cruises are included as well
• No temporal resolution

Coverage and spatial resolution:

• Global
• Spatial resolution: 0.5° x 0.5°, cartesian grid
• Geographic longitude: 0.0°E to 359.5°E
• Geographic latitude: -80.0°N to 90.0°N
• Dimension: 720 columns x 341 rows x N=44 depths
• Altitude: N depths, see Technical Report

Format:

• NetCDF

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Data quality

Please see Technical Report: WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology in the references.

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Contact

Stefan Kern
University of Hamburg
E-Mail: stefan.kern (at) uni-hamburg.de

Remon Sadikni
ICDC / CEN / University of Hamburg
E-Mail: remon.sadikni (at) uni-hamburg.de

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References

Literature:

• Technical Report: WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology, ftp://ftp-icdc.cen.uni-hamburg.de/WOCE/climatology/observed_data/BSH35_report_final.pdf  (pdf, not barrier-free)
• WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology, https://odv.awi.de/data/ocean/woce-global-hydrographic-climatology/ 

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Data citation, License, and Acknowledgments

Please cite the data as follows:

Gouretski,V. V., Koltermann, K. P.: WOCE Climatology, 2010, ICDC, CEN, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.

and with the following acknowledgments:

Thanks to ICDC, CEN, University of Hamburg for data support.

License

The data was published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0).

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