The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) is a

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

product of the Ocean Climate Laboratory of the

National Oceanographic Data Center The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) was one of the national environmental data centers operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The main NODC facility was located in Sil ...

( U.S.). The WOA consists of a

climatology Climatology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , ''wiktionary:-logia, -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 ...

of fields of ''

in situ ''In situ'' (; often not italicized in English) is a Latin phrase that translates literally to "on site" or "in position." It can mean "locally", "on site", "on the premises", or "in place" to describe where an event takes place and is used in ...

ocean The ocean (also the sea or the world ocean) is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of the surface of Earth and contains 97% of Earth's water. An ocean can also refer to any of the large bodies of water into which the wo ...

properties for the

World Ocean The ocean (also the sea or the world ocean) is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of the surface of Earth and contains 97% of Earth's water. An ocean can also refer to any of the large bodies of water into which the wor ...

. It was first produced in 1994 (based on the earlier ''Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean''), with later editions at roughly four year intervals in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, and 2013.

Dataset

The fields that make up the WOA dataset consist of objectively-analysed

global Global means of or referring to a globe and may also refer to: Entertainment * ''Global'' (Paul van Dyk album), 2003 * ''Global'' (Bunji Garlin album), 2007 * ''Global'' (Humanoid album), 1989 * ''Global'' (Todd Rundgren album), 2015 * Bruno ...

grids at 1 °

spatial resolution In physics and geosciences, the term spatial resolution refers to distance between independent measurements, or the physical dimension that represents a pixel of the image. While in some instruments, like cameras and telescopes, spatial resoluti ...

. The fields are

three-dimensional Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informal ...

, and data are typically interpolated onto 33 standardised vertical intervalsStandardised intervals are at 0, 10, 20, 30, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 200, 250, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500, 1750, 2000, 2500, 3000, 3500, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500 m from the surface (0 m) to the

abyssal The abyssal zone or abyssopelagic zone is a layer of the pelagic zone of the ocean. "Abyss" derives from the Greek word , meaning bottomless. At depths of , this zone remains in perpetual darkness. It covers 83% of the total area of the ocean an ...

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, averaged fields are produced for annual,

season A season is a division of the year based on changes in weather, ecology, and the number of daylight hours in a given region. On Earth, seasons are the result of the axial parallelism of Earth's tilted orbit around the Sun. In temperate and po ...

al and monthly time-scales. The WOA fields include ocean

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various temperature scales that historically have relied on ...

salinity Salinity () is the saltiness or amount of salt dissolved in a body of water, called saline water (see also soil salinity). It is usually measured in g/L or g/kg (grams of salt per liter/kilogram of water; the latter is dimensionless and equal ...

dissolved oxygen Oxygen saturation (symbol SO2) is a relative measure of the concentration of oxygen that is dissolved or carried in a given medium as a proportion of the maximal concentration that can be dissolved in that medium at the given temperature. It ca ...

, apparent oxygen utilisation (AOU),

percent In mathematics, a percentage (from la, per centum, "by a hundred") is a number or ratio expressed as a fraction of 100. It is often denoted using the percent sign, "%", although the abbreviations "pct.", "pct" and sometimes "pc" are also us ...

oxygen saturation Oxygen saturation (symbol SO2) is a relative measure of the concentration of oxygen that is dissolved or carried in a given medium as a proportion of the maximal concentration that can be dissolved in that medium at the given temperature. It ca ...

phosphate In chemistry, a phosphate is an anion, salt, functional group or ester derived from a phosphoric acid. It most commonly means orthophosphate, a derivative of orthophosphoric acid . The phosphate or orthophosphate ion is derived from phosph ...

silicic acid Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, is an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula , most commonly found in nature as quartz and in various living organisms. In many parts of the world, silica is the major constituent of sand. Silica is one ...

, and

nitrate Nitrate is a polyatomic ion with the chemical formula . Salts containing this ion are called nitrates. Nitrates are common components of fertilizers and explosives. Almost all inorganic nitrates are soluble in water. An example of an insoluble ...

. Early editions of the WOA additionally included fields such as mixed layer depth and sea surface height. In addition to the averaged fields of ocean properties, the WOA also contains fields of

statistical Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industr ...

information concerning the constituent data that the averages were produced from. These include fields such as the number of data points the average is derived from, their standard deviation and

standard error The standard error (SE) of a statistic (usually an estimate of a parameter) is the standard deviation of its sampling distribution or an estimate of that standard deviation. If the statistic is the sample mean, it is called the standard error ...

. A lower horizontal resolution (5°) version of the WOA is also available. The WOA dataset is primarily available as compressed

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

, but since WOA 2005 a

netCDF NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. The project homepage is hosted by the Unidata ...

version has also been produced.

Gallery

File:WOA09 sea-surf TMP AYool.png, Annual mean sea surface temperature (WOA 2009) File:WOA09 sea-surf SAL AYool.png, Annual mean sea surface salinity (WOA 2009) File:WOA09 sea-surf O2 AYool.png, Annual mean sea surface dissolved oxygen (WOA 2009) File:WOA09 sea-surf PO4 AYool.png, Annual mean sea surface phosphate (WOA 2009) File:WOA09 sea-surf H4SIO4 AYool.png, Annual mean sea surface silicic acid (WOA 2009) File:WOA09 sea-surf NO3 AYool.png, Annual mean sea surface nitrate (WOA 2009) File:WOA09 1000m AOU AYool.png, Annual mean apparent oxygen utilization at 1000 m depth (WOA 2009)

References

External links

NODC Ocean Climate Laboratory datasets and products
{{physical oceanography Chemical oceanography * Oceanography World Ocean

Dataset

Gallery

See also

References

External links