World wide

Salinity of the water column; Temperature of the water column

Salinity sensor

The EN2 data set contains global, sub-surface ocean profiles of (potential) temperature and salinity. They were quality controlled using a comprehensive set of objective checks developed at the Met Office Hadley Centre - drawing on documented procedures from other centres where appropriate. The quality control was applied consistently over the whole period, and the checked profiles were output in a uniform format (NetCDF). The profiles were obtained primarily from the WORLD OCEAN DATABASE 2001, but this was supplemented using data from other sources especially GTSPP for recent years. The quality control and processing system was developed and improved for the EU-supported projects ENACT and ENSEMBLES. It has now been used to process over 7.4 million reports (including duplicates) for the period 1956-2004. These are available below as version v1a (note that until 17 June the v1 files available for 2000-2004 had significant data gaps). A useful by-product of the system is a model-free monthly objective analysis, see Ingleby and Huddleston (2005) for details and contact the authors if you wish to use these gridded fields. A further release of the quality controlled data for ENSEMBLES will be made in early 2006.

Ingleby,B. and Huddleston, M. (2005) Quality control of ocean profiles - historical and real-time data., Journal of Marine Systems, Volume 65 (1-4):158-175

Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
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United Kingdom