Annual Mean Surface Salinity

The data have been extracted from data holdings at the ICES Data Centre and supplemented by additional records from the World Ocean Data Centre (WODC).

From the original data, which are irregularly distributed in space and time, the mean monthly temperature and salinity are calculated, as well as the climatic mean annual cycle. The climatology presented here is an improvement upon all existing climatologies presented in the literature for this area, covering a wider area on a finer scale and including both the surface and near-bed distribution of both temperature and salinity. The data and methodology are further explained in the below paper that was published in Continental Shelf Research.

Temperature and salinity profiles, metadata or trajectories from the Argo floats deployed by the UK or in the Southern Ocean may be obtained from the British Oceanographic Data Centre.

The table below describes the attributes within the spatial layer on NMPi.

The amplitude and phase of the annual cycle were calculated based on a statistical fit of a periodic signal with a 12 month and a 6 month period (using harmonic analysis).  The phase has been re-calculated to give a “month of maximum”, in addition to the more traditional expression of phase in radians.