World Ocean Database 2013 User’s Manual.

Abstract

World Ocean Database 2013 (WOD13) is a scientifically quality-controlled database of selected historical in-situ surface and subsurface oceanographic measurements produced by the Ocean Climate Laboratory (OCL) at the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC), Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. WOD13 updates and expands on an earlier version of our product, World Ocean Database 2009 (WOD09) by adding additional data and also increasing the number of standard levels and depths from 40 to 137 (see Appendix 9 for the standard depths). WOD13 provides quality-controlled data to calculate climatologies of temperature, salinity, oxygen, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate . These climatologies are used to produce the World Ocean Atlas 2013 (WOA13). The variables for which climatologies were calculated have full quality control, except for the oxygen and chlorophyll data from the Conductivity-Temperature-Depth (CTD) probes and Undulating Oceanographic Recorder (UOR) probes. These data and data for other measured variables have a more limited set of quality control. More detailed information is provided in Section III, Quality Control Procedures. In addition to quality control performed during calculation of WOA13 climatologies, quality control performed by the data submitters is included as originators’ flags when available.