Updated ocean data made available to ocean scientific community

Abstract

The World Ocean Atlas 1994, which provides new climatologies of major ocean parameters and related data, is now available in print, on CD‐ROM in ASCII format, or on Exabyte tape from the NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC). The atlas provides global analyses of ocean temperature, salinity, oxygen, oxygen saturation, apparent oxygen utilization, phosphate, nitrate, and silicate on a one‐degree, latitude longitude grid for standard depth levels from the sea surface to 5500 m depth. The ocean profile data sets from which the gridded fields were derived are also included in the package.The five‐volume atlas supersedes the Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean, which was published by Levitus in 1982. Many of the new data that are included—particularly those from countries other than the United States—have been received in recent years through the efforts of the Global Oceanographic Data Archaeology and Rescue Project. The goal of this project is to increase the volume of digital historical oceanographic data accessible to the worldwide research community.