WOA (World Ocean Atlas)

WOA (World Ocean Atlas)
Name	World Ocean Atlas
Caption	Global ocean climatology product
Publisher	National Oceanographic Data Center
Country	United States
Language	English
First	1994
Latest	2018

Contents

WOA (World Ocean Atlas) is a suite of objectively analyzed global ocean climatologies produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Centers for Environmental Information, developed to provide standardized fields of seawater properties for research and operational use. The product supports climate assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, seasonal prediction systems like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation monitoring efforts, and ocean reanalysis projects including collaborations with the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment and the World Meteorological Organization.

Overview

The Atlas compiles gridded climatological fields of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nutrients, and transient tracers used by communities connected to the International Oceanographic Commission, the Climate and Ocean: Variability, Predictability and Change program, and the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research community. It provides multi-decadal mean states employed in studies at institutions such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. The WOA format has been referenced in assessments by the United Nations Environment Programme and in operational analyses by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Development began with syntheses by the World Ocean Atlas 1994 era teams and subsequent major releases aligned with efforts at the National Oceanographic Data Center and the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Major updates correspond with advances at the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment and the emergence of programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the International CLIVAR Project Office. Collaborations included data contributions from the Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program, the Argo float program, and long-term observational series managed by the National Science Foundation and regional arrays such as the TAO/TRITON and PIRATA networks.

WOA analysis uses quality-controlled observations archived at repositories including the World Ocean Database and inputs from platforms like Argo, shipboard surveys by the Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program, and time-series from moored observatories such as HOT (Hawaii Ocean Time-series), BATS (Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study), and OSNAP. Objective analysis employs statistical methods consistent with approaches used in products from the Hadley Centre and the Met Office for atmospheric fields, with interpolation schemes similar to those used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth science teams. Vertical binning, objective mapping, and seasonal climatology construction parallel methodologies from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea and techniques validated against independent datasets from the Global Ocean Observing System.

Standard WOA products include gridded fields of potential temperature, practical salinity, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, phosphate, silicate, and chlorofluorocarbons used in tracer studies by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and investigators at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Outputs are provided at multiple vertical levels and horizontal resolutions compatible with models from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and regional systems run by the California Institute of Technology consortiums. Time-averaged products support paleoceanographic calibration work cited in publications from the American Geophysical Union and the European Geosciences Union.

Researchers at institutions including the University of Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the National Oceanography Centre use the climatologies for model initialization in coupled systems developed at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and for bias correction in reanalysis projects overseen by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Marine biogeochemical studies by teams at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute use nutrient fields for ecosystem modeling, while fisheries assessments by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations leverage temperature and oxygen climatologies. Policymakers referencing reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have used WOA-derived metrics in sea surface and subsurface change syntheses.

Limitations arise from uneven sampling in regions such as the Southern Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and marginal seas like the South China Sea, where observations from programs such as Argo and historical hydrographic campaigns are sparse. Biases introduced by temporal averaging affect representations of variability relevant to phenomena like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and uncertainty quantification draws on comparisons with independent datasets from the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment and satellite missions by the European Space Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Users are cautioned when applying WOA fields to high-resolution coastal modeling used by authorities such as the National Ocean Service and regional agencies.

WOA datasets are distributed through portals maintained by the National Centers for Environmental Information and are mirrored by data services at the World Data Center system, the International Council for Science data repositories, and partner archives such as the British Oceanographic Data Centre and the PANGAEA data library. Licensing and citation guidance follow policies of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and community norms in publications by the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.

Category:Oceanography Category:Climate data sets