Polar Science Center Hydrographic Climatology (PHC)

The climatology provides temperature and salinity data at 1X1
degree intervals for all the earth's oceans, down to a depth
of 5500m, at incremental depths identical to those provided
in the National Oceanographic Data Center's (NODC) World Ocean
Atlas (WOA). This global climatology is the combination of
NODC's 1998 world climatology (WOA), the EWG Arctic Ocean Atlas
(AOA), and select Canadian data provided by the Bedford
Institute of Oceanography (BIO). While the NODC data includes
the Arctic ocean, the AOA data provides a better description of
this region. Neither of these data fields provides a good
representation of the Canadian Archipelago region and nearby
bays in the winter months. The data from the Bedford Institute
of Oceanography allowed us to bridge this data hole. These
three data sets were merged using an optimal interpolation
routine such that our PHC retains the high quality world
description provided by the WOA while improving the Arctic with
the AOA fields and Canadian data.


In summary, PHC = WOA (Levitus) '98 everywhere except in our
arctic domain, where we have blended in the AOA field
(from EWG), and the BIO data to produce a more realistic arctic
region.


These Version 3.0 data were received from the Polar
Science Center, Applied Physics Lab., University of Washington,
during April 2005.