19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Multi-disciplinary Use

World Ocean Database 2001 (WOD01)

Robert D. Gelfeld (Robert.Gelfeld@noaa.gov)
National Oceanographic Data Center, USA
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov

The World Ocean Database 2001 (WOD01) is an online tool to help scientists and managers study the role of the ocean as part of the earth's climate system, conduct fisheries research, and manage marine resources.

In 1982, the Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean was published.  This was the first global atlas depicting objectively analyzed fields of temperature, salinity, and oxygen based on all data available from the NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC)/World Data Center for Oceanography, Silver Spring (WDC) in electronic as well as paper form. This was followed in 1994 and 1998 with the publications of the World Ocean Atlas 1994 (WOA94), the World Ocean Database 1998 (WOD98), and the World Ocean Atlas 1998 (WOA98).  Today, the World Ocean Database 2001 (WOD01) greatly expands on the 1998 product by including data from new instrument types (such as profiling floats), new variables (such as pCO2 and TCO2), and many more historical as well as modern data for the variables in WOD98.

During the past nine years, the number of temperature profiles electronically archived at NODC/WDC has increased, from approximately 2.5 million to 7 million as a result of projects such as the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) / NODC Global Oceanographic Data Archaeology and Rescue Project (GODAR), IOC World Ocean Database Project, Global Temperature-Salinity Profile Project (GTSPP), World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), Joint Global Ocean Flux Studies (JGOFS), Ocean Margin Experiment (OMEX), and many others.

The goal in developing and distributing WOD01 is to make available in electronic form – without restriction – the most complete set of historical ocean profile-plankton measurements possible along with appropriate metadata and quality control flags.    Whether studying the role of the ocean as part of the earth's climate system, conducting fisheries research, or managing marine resources, scientists and managers depend on observations of the marine environment in order to fulfill their mission.  The WOD01 is a product based on data submitted to the NODC and the WDC for Oceanography by individual scientists and scientific teams as well as institutional, national, and regional data centers.