The Global Ocean Data Analysis Project (GLODAP) is a synthesis project bringing together

oceanographic Oceanography (), also known as oceanology, sea science, ocean science, and marine science, is the scientific study of the ocean, including its physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. It is an Earth science, which covers a wide range of top ...

data, featuring two major releases as of 2018. The central goal of GLODAP is to generate a global

climatology Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "slope"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. Climate concerns the atmospher ...

of the

World Ocean The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. The ocean is conventionally divided into large bodies of water, which are also referred to as ''oceans'' (the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Antarctic/Southern, and ...

carbon cycle The carbon cycle is a part of the biogeochemical cycle where carbon is exchanged among the biosphere, pedosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere of Earth. Other major biogeochemical cycles include the nitrogen cycle and the water cycl ...

for use in studies of both its natural and anthropogenically forced states. GLODAP is funded by the

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) is an American scientific and regulatory agency charged with Weather forecasting, forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, Hydrography, charting the seas, ...

, the

U.S. Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear we ...

, and the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

. The first GLODAP release (v1.1) was produced from data collected during the 1990s by research cruises on the

World Ocean Circulation Experiment The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) was a component of the international World Climate Research Program, and aimed to establish the role of the World Ocean in the Earth's climate system. WOCE's field phase ran between 1990 and 1998, and ...

, Joint Global Ocean Flux Study and Ocean-Atmosphere Exchange Study programmes. The second GLODAP release (v2) extended the first using data from cruises from 2000 to 2013. The data are available both as individual "bottle data" from sample sites, and as interpolated fields on a standard longitude, latitude, depth grid.

Dataset

The GLODAPv1.1 climatology contains analysed fields of "present day" (1990s) dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC),

alkalinity Alkalinity (from ) is the capacity of water to resist Freshwater acidification, acidification. It should not be confused with base (chemistry), basicity, which is an absolute measurement on the pH scale. Alkalinity is the strength of a buffer s ...

carbon-14 Carbon-14, C-14, C or radiocarbon, is a radioactive isotope of carbon with an atomic nucleus containing 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Its presence in organic matter is the basis of the radiocarbon dating method pioneered by Willard Libby and coll ...

(¹⁴C), CFC-11 and CFC-12. The fields consist of

three-dimensional In geometry, a three-dimensional space (3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a mathematical space in which three values (''coordinates'') are required to determine the position (geometry), position of a point (geometry), poi ...

, objectively-analysed global grids at 1°

horizontal resolution Dots per inch (DPI, or dpiThe acronym appears in sources as either "DPI" or lowercase "dpi". See "Print Resolution Understanding 4-bit depth – Xerox" (PDF). Xerox.com. September 2012.) is a measure of spatial printing, video or image scanner ...

, interpolated onto 33 standardised vertical intervals from the surface (0 m) to the abyssal

seafloor The seabed (also known as the seafloor, sea floor, ocean floor, and ocean bottom) is the bottom of the ocean. All floors of the ocean are known as seabeds. The structure of the seabed of the global ocean is governed by plate tectonics. Most of ...

(5500 m). In terms of temporal resolution, the relative scarcity of the source data mean that, unlike the World Ocean Atlas, averaged fields are only produced for the annual time-scale. The GLODAP climatology is missing data in certain oceanic provinces including the

Arctic Ocean The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five oceanic divisions. It spans an area of approximately and is the coldest of the world's oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, ...

, the

Caribbean Sea The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, located south of the Gulf of Mexico and southwest of the Sargasso Sea. It is bounded by the Greater Antilles to the north from Cuba ...

, the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Eur ...

and

Maritime Southeast Asia Maritime Southeast Asia comprises the Southeast Asian countries of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and East Timor. The terms Island Southeast Asia and Insular Southeast Asia are sometimes given the same meaning as ...

. Additionally, analysis has attempted to separate natural from anthropogenic DIC, to produce fields of pre- industrial (18th century) DIC and "present day" anthropogenic . This separation allows estimation of the magnitude of the ocean

sink A sink (also known as ''basin'' in the UK) is a bowl-shaped plumbing fixture for washing hands, dishwashing, and other purposes. Sinks have a tap (faucet) that supplies hot and cold water and may include a spray feature to be used for fas ...

for anthropogenic , and is important for studies of phenomena such as

ocean acidification Ocean acidification is the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's ocean. Between 1950 and 2020, the average pH of the ocean surface fell from approximately 8.15 to 8.05. Carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are the primary cause of ...

.Orr, J. C. ''et al.'' (2005)
Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms.
''Nature'' 437, 681–686Raven, J. A. ''et al.'' (2005)
Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Royal Society, London, UK However, as anthropogenic DIC is chemically and physically identical to natural DIC, this separation is difficult. GLODAP used a mathematical technique known as C* (C-star) to deconvolute anthropogenic from natural DIC (there are a number of alternative methods). This uses information about ocean

biogeochemistry Biogeochemistry is the Branches of science, scientific discipline that involves the study of the chemistry, chemical, physics, physical, geology, geological, and biology, biological processes and reactions that govern the composition of the natu ...

and surface disequilibrium together with other ocean tracers including carbon-14, CFC-11 and CFC-12 (which indicate water mass age) to try to separate out natural from that added during the ongoing anthropogenic transient. The technique is not straightforward and has associated errors, although it is gradually being refined to improve it. Its findings are generally supported by independent predictions made by dynamic models. The GLODAPv2 climatology largely repeats the earlier format, but makes use of the large number of observations of the ocean's carbon cycle made over the intervening period (2000–2013). The analysed "present-day" fields in the resulting dataset are normalised to year 2002. Anthropogenic carbon was estimated in GLODAPv2 using a "transit-time distribution" (TTD) method (an approach using a

Green's function In mathematics, a Green's function (or Green function) is the impulse response of an inhomogeneous linear differential operator defined on a domain with specified initial conditions or boundary conditions. This means that if L is a linear dif ...

). In addition to updated fields of DIC (total and anthropogenic) and alkalinity, GLODAPv2 includes fields of seawater pH and

calcium carbonate Calcium carbonate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is a common substance found in Rock (geology), rocks as the minerals calcite and aragonite, most notably in chalk and limestone, eggshells, gastropod shells, shellfish skel ...

saturation state (Ω; omega). The latter is a non-dimensional number calculated by dividing the local

carbonate A carbonate is a salt of carbonic acid, (), characterized by the presence of the carbonate ion, a polyatomic ion with the formula . The word "carbonate" may also refer to a carbonate ester, an organic compound containing the carbonate group ...

ion concentration by the ambient saturation concentration for calcium carbonate (for the biomineral polymorphs

calcite Calcite is a Carbonate minerals, carbonate mineral and the most stable Polymorphism (materials science), polymorph of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). It is a very common mineral, particularly as a component of limestone. Calcite defines hardness 3 on ...

and

aragonite Aragonite is a carbonate mineral and one of the three most common naturally occurring crystal forms of calcium carbonate (), the others being calcite and vaterite. It is formed by biological and physical processes, including precipitation fr ...

), and relates to an oceanographic property, the

carbonate compensation depth The carbonate compensation depth (CCD) is the depth, in the oceans, at which the rate of supply of calcium carbonates matches the rate of solvation. That is, solvation 'compensates' supply. Below the CCD solvation is faster, so that carbonate pa ...

. Values of this below 1 indicate undersaturation, and potential dissolution, while values above 1 indicate

supersaturation In physical chemistry, supersaturation occurs with a solution (chemistry), solution when the concentration of a solute exceeds the concentration specified by the value of solubility at Solubility equilibrium, equilibrium. Most commonly the term ...

, and relative stability.

Gallery

The following panels show sea surface concentrations of fields prepared by GLODAPv1.1. The "pre-industrial" is the 18th century, while "present-day" is approximately the 1990s. The following panels show sea surface concentrations of fields prepared by GLODAPv2. The "pre-industrial" is the 18th century, while "present-day" is normalised to 2002. Note that these properties are shown in

mass Mass is an Intrinsic and extrinsic properties, intrinsic property of a physical body, body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the physical quantity, quantity of matter in a body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physi ...

units (per kilogram of seawater) rather than the

volume Volume is a measure of regions in three-dimensional space. It is often quantified numerically using SI derived units (such as the cubic metre and litre) or by various imperial or US customary units (such as the gallon, quart, cubic inch) ...

units (per cubic metre of seawater) used in the GLODAPv1.1 panels.

References

External links

GLODAP website
Bjerknes Climate Data Centre
GLODAP v1.1 website

GLODAP v2 website
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration {{physical oceanography Biological oceanography Carbon Chemical oceanography Chlorofluorocarbons Oceanography Physical oceanography

Dataset

Gallery

See also

References

External links