Global climatological data of ocean thermohaline parameters derived from WOA18

Peter C Chu; Chenwu Fan

doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02308-7

Global climatological data of ocean thermohaline parameters derived from WOA18

Sci Data. 2023 Jun 24;10(1):408. doi: 10.1038/s41597-023-02308-7.

Authors

Peter C Chu¹, Chenwu Fan²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Oceanography, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, 93943, USA. pcchu@nps.edu.
² Department of Oceanography, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, 93943, USA.

Abstract

This is a global ocean climatological dataset of 17 thermohaline parameters such as isothermal layer (ITL) depth (h_T), mixed layer (ML) depth (h_D), thermocline gradient (G_T), pycnocline gradient (G_D) determined from temperature (T) and salinity (S) profiles of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) world ocean atlas 2018 (WOA18) using the double gradient method along with the identity-index (i-index) showing the quality of the determination. With the identified (h_T, h_D) and (G_T, G_D), other parameters such as ITL heat content (H_ITL), mixed layer fresh-water content (F_ML), maximum thermocline gradient (G_Tmax), thermocline depth (h_th), temperature at thermocline depth (T_th), maximum density gradient G_Dmax), pycnocline depth (h_pyc), density at pycnocline depth (ρ_pyc), and (h_T - h_D) (barrier layer if positive or compensated layer if negative). The dataset is located at the NOAA/NCEI website ( https://doi.org/10.25921/j3v2-jy50 ). It provides useful background information for ocean mixed layer dynamics, air-sea interaction, climatological studies. This paper is the only document for the dataset.

Publication types

Dataset