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Updated Ocean Database Available Online - Polar Science Center Hydrographic Climatology
The Polar Science Center Hydrographic Climatology (PHC) has been recently updated. PHC 3.0 is a smoothed, gridded 3-dimensional global ocean database of annual, seasonal (winter and summer), and monthly climatological mean temperature and salinity. It is the first GLOBAL gridded database with a high-quality description of the arctic seas, achieved by merging data from several sources, including Russian and Canadian.
The update fixed two sources of small anomalies:
(1) Anomalies created by the background field used for optimal interpolation in PHC 2.1 were eliminated. In the arctic, these errors sometimes led to overly warm surface water (order 0.1 deg C or less above the freezing point) which could affect ocean-ice heat fluxes.
(2) Other anomalies caused by differences in our input data sets near the Arctic Ocean bottom were also eliminated. These errors sometimes created isolated regions of static instability which, in a numerical model, can lead to dynamic topography anomalies which generate stationary eddies.
PHC 3.0 is available online at: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/Climatology.html
Funding for the development of PHC has been generously provided by the Office of Naval Research, High Latitude Program, by NASA's Earth Observing System, and by the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs.
Inquiries about PHC 3.0 may be sent to:
Michael Steele
Applied Physics Laboratory
1013 NE 40th St.
Seattle, WA 98105 USA
E-mail: mas@apl.washington.edu
Phone: 206-543-6586
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