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Temperature and salinity data in the Arctic Ocean.
A comprehensive quality-checked data set of observations since 1980
Since the early 20th century hydrographic measurements have been carried out in the Arctic Ocean. Although today the Arctic is a hotspot of climate change, data sampling is still sparse due to the large sea ice cover. Yet both the historical and the modern observational data are important for long-term climate studies in the Arctic Ocean.
Many of the collected data are publicly available, but scattered across different electronic archives. Consequently, scientists working on Arctic climate change have to assemble data from different databases. A further problem is that these accessible data have undergone different, or sometimes no, procedures of quality testing and often contain large numbers of duplicates.
The „Unified Database for Arctic and Subarctic Hydrography“ (UDASH) is an attempt to gather all publicly available temperature and salinity data for the Arctic Ocean and to provide them on a high quality level and with easy access. The database contains almost 290.000 quality checked oceanographic profiles for the Arctic Mediterranean north of 65°N in the time period 1980-2015. It thus represents a unique tool to study long-term changes in the Arctic Ocean on a larger scale.
The adjusted archive will be open for updates in time, and any additional data that are not yet included are very much appreciated. Besides the data, metadata and an extensive manual, a software will be provided that allows the user to quickly extract the desired data from the archive.
In a second step the data will be used to create a gridded product and an updated Arctic Ocean climatology.
This work was funded by the FRAM project: www.awi.de/en/expedition/observatories/ocean-fram.html
Publication: Behrendt, A., Sumata, H., Rabe, B., and Schauer, U.: UDASH – Unified Database for Arctic and Subarctic Hydrography, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 1119-1138, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-1119-2018, 2018.