About the Data on this Website

J. Swift

The data sets provided at this website were put together in order to provide Java OceanAtlas users the best available 'blue water' ocean vertical profile data. Java OceanAtlas can read several data formats in addition to JOA binary, such as NODC SD2, EPIC netCDF, WOCE 'WHP-Exchange', and spreadsheets (certain caveats apply for spreadsheets). But it is easier for many users to have data at hand, plus we have added value to some data by organizing sections, by combining and deleting stations, and by correcting some errors.

Our largest collection is ca. 2200 vertical sections assembled from the original NODC data files contributing to SIO Professor Joseph Reid's World Ocean data collection. From the many thousands of cruises in NODC Archives, and some newer cruises originally from colleagues, over more than two decades Joe sifted for the best available data from each region of the World Ocean (except for the Arctic). His intended purpose was to make maps of water properties, and so he cut off stations from a cruise where a better (better for his purposes) cruise overlapped it. He made corrections to many of the data for known offsets (mostly standard seawater batch offsets). Here we went into the NODC files and retrieved the entire cruise data set for each cruise Joe used, assembled the stations into sensible vertical sections, applied the same corrections Joe used, and then we culled many bad data values. The resulting 2200 sections represent the basic data knowledge of the deep ocean basins prior to the 1990s. The data sets all include temperature and salinity, nearly all have dissolved oxygen data, and most have nutrient (NO3, PO4, and/or SiO3) data.

The best of these pre-1990s sections for examining basin-scale ocean water properties are collected together as the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Pre-WOCE Basin Scale Sections, along with sections from the highly-regarded GEOSECS, TTO, and SAVE expeditions. A collection of Arctic Ocean and Nordic Sea data is also provided.

Basin-scale sections from the 1990-1998 WOCE Hydrographic Program are also provided. We removed station overlaps where multiple cruise legs were needed for a given WHP section. Most WHP sections contain data for an expanded range of properties such as CFCs, CO2 system parameters, He/Tr, and/or radiocarbon.

Syd Levitus and colleagues at NOAA have assembled collections of quality-controlled mean temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and nutrients on standard level surfaces on a 1-degree positional grid for the World Ocean, known as WOA98. We picked the values at each grid point from all the levels and assembled them into vertical profiles at a sub-grid spacing which provides adequate basin-scale visualization with reduced computer resource requirements. Various collections of these sub-grids are provided. We also provide vertical sections at the original one-degree resolution of WOA98 at 10-degree intervals of latitude and longitude. WOA98 is a 'mean ocean' often used as data in ocean models. JOA users can experiment with these data and compare them to the non-mean, non-gridded data provided in our other data collections.