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Three Decades of in Situ Sea Surface Salinity Measurements in the Tropical Pacific Ocean |
Monthly 1969-95 Gridded Values, Mean Monthly Year and Climatology |
| Data origin. The original sea-surface salinity data (about 270,000 items)
used to build the gridded fields originate from a combination of: (1) bucket measurements
(60%) collected via an IRD ship-of-opportunity program, (2) hydrocast and CTD measurements
collected during more than two hundred research cruises, (3) measurements taken by
thermosalinographs installed on board merchant and research vessels, and (4)
thermosalinograph measurements from TAO moorings. Validation procedure. The measurements were tested systematically through basic procedures that verified internal consistency and climatic limits. Spurious SSS measurements were further detected through objective criteria based on multiples of sample standard deviations (±5, ±4, and then ±3.5) computed in 2° latitude by 10° longitude rectangles. Number of observations. The time/space distribution of the original SSS measurements is similar to the one shown in Delcroix et al. [Deep Sea Res., 43, 1123-1141, 1996, their Figure 1], except in the western tropical Pacific where there are additional data obtained from thermosalinographs. The time/space distribution is available as a monthly 2 latitude by 10° longitude gridded field (file nobsss). Gridding procedure and data access. The irregularly distributed SSS data, both in space and time, were gridded by an objective interpolation scheme (Laplacian method), resulting in a monthly 2° latitude by 10° longitude field over the 1969-1995 period (file gridsss). The gridded values must be used with great care in poorly sampled regions. Long-term mean and standard deviation were computed over the 1979-1992 period (file climsss), as well as mean monthly years (files meansss and stdsss). Additional information about the gridded files can be found in Delcroix (J. Geophys. Res., 103, 18611-18633, 1998). Click on the named files below to download |
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 Monthly 1969-95 gridded values ( gridsss.gz 186K) |
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| Monthly 1969-95 number of observations (nobsss.gz 82K) |
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1979-92 climatology: mean and standard deviation (climsss.gz 3K)  |
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Mean monthly year: mean over 1979-92 (meansss.gz 7K)  |
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| Mean monthly year: standard deviations over 1979-92
(stdsss.gz 6K) |
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| How to read the data : format and Fortran programs readme |
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©Copyright IRD July 2000 |