Historical hydrographic data

Validated temperature and salinity data set of the global ocean (1804-2010)

There is a general need in the oceanographic community for a historic hydrographic data product providing quality-controlled temperature and salinity profiles as long backwards in time as possible. Such a data base will be important for many different applications in the oceanographic community since it will provide a description of the two most important characteristics of sea water.

Applications will include water mass analysis, ocean modeling but especially also ocean syntheses estimating the time-varying ocean circulation by combining all available ocean data with ocean models. The data product WOHP (World Ocean Hydrographic Profiles) consists of Temperature- und Salinity profiles, which are obtained by means of Nansen casts (bottle data), CTD casts and Profiling Floats. The major part of the original data set was provided by the latest update (Dec 2010) of the World Ocean Database 2009 (Boyer et al., 2009). 

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Historical hydrograhpic data from BSH

In a cooperative effort between the KlimaCampus of the University of Hamburg, the German Oceanographic Data Centre (DOD, Hamburg), the Publishing Network for Geoscientific and Environmental Data (PANGEA) and the Alfred Wegener Institut für Polarforschung (AWI), we aim to locate and rescue oceanographic data that are stored in manuscript or digital form but are not yet available for the oceanographic community. Since 2009 these efforts resulted in locating about 7500 hydrographic profiles obtained mostly in the decades before the second World War and until recently available only as station logs at the German Oceanographic Datacentre (DOD).

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CTD profiles from IfM Collaborative Research Centre Cruises

The KlimaCampus of the University  has started a project with the aim to locate oceanographic data that are not yet available for the oceanographic community through the international archives. Since 2009 these efforts resulted in locating of 532 CTD profiles obtained after 2000 on IfM Collaborative Research Centre Cruises in the North Atlantic.

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References

• T. P. Boyer, J. I. Antonov, O. K. Baranova, H. E. Garcia, D. R. Johnson, R. A. Locarnini, A. V. Mishonov, T. D. O’Brien, D. Seidov, I. V. Smolyar, M. M. Zweng, 2009: World Ocean Database 2009, Chapter 1: Introduction, NOAA Atlas NESDIS 66, Ed. S. Levitus, U.S. Gov. Printing Office, Wash., D.C., 216 pp., DVD. (pdf, not barrier-free)