The WAGHC is a full-depth one-fourth degree resolution temperature and salinity climatology describing the mean state of the World Ocean between 1996 and 2011, with monthly gridded fields available between the surface and 1778 m depth.
World Ocean Database 2013 (Locarnini et al., 2013) provided the majority of the temperature and salinity profiles, whereas data from the Alfred-Wegener-Institute, Bremerhaven, and from several Canadian Institutes helped to improve the data basis for the North Polar region considerably. A rigorous data quality control procedure was applied to the original profiles to exclude erroneous and highly untypical data.
The spatial interpolation of the quality-controlled data was performed both on isobaric and isopycnal levels, so that essentially two climatologies are available. The isopycnally-averaged climatology mimics the process of isopycnal mixing in the real ocean and therefore is less prone to the production of artificial water masses.
The WAGHC climatology represents the update of the WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology (Gouretski and Koltermann, 2004). The name of the new climatology was chosen to highlight both the outstanding role of the WOCE hydrographic data for the historical global hydrographic archive and the importance of the more recent data from the Argo floats.
Web-link: http://icdc.cen.uni-hamburg.de/1/daten/ocean/waghc/ References:
Locarnini, R. A., A. V. Mishonov, J. I. Antonov, T. P. Boyer, H. E. Garcia, O. K. Baranova, M. M. Zweng, C. R. Paver, J. R. Reagan, D. R. Johnson, M. Hamilton, D. Seidov (2013) World Ocean Atlas 2013, Volume 1: Temperature. S. Levitus, Ed., A. Mishonov Technical Ed.; NOAA Atlas NESDIS 73, 40 pp.
Gouretski, V., Koltermann, K.(2004) WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology, Berichte des BSH, 35, 52pp., ISSN: 0946-6010.
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The work was conducted as part of the Excellence Initiative CLISAP at the Universität Hamburg, funded through the German Science Foundation (Grant EXC 177/2)