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The World Ocean Atlas 2001 (WOA01) is an update of World Ocean Atlas 1998. WOA01 expands on WOA98 with the addition of the monthly nutrients fields and the introduction of annual and seasonal zooplankton biomass fields.
The WOA01 consists of three CD-ROMs containing global data statistics at standand depth levels by one-degree and five-degree squares of several commonly measured ocean variables, as well as objectively analyzed fields (on a one-degree grid) of these variables.
- Disc 1: Temperature & Salinity
- Disc 2: Oxygen (dissolved oxygen, apparent oxygen utilization (AOU), and percent oxygen saturation)
- Disc 3: Nutrients (phosphate, nitrate, and silicate), Chlorophyll & Zooplankton Biomass
As with previous works, ocean profile data from 'observed' depth levels are vertically interpolated to standard depth levels. Thirty-three (33) standard depth levels extend from the sea surface to 5500 meter depth. Zooplankton biomass is from the sea surface to 200 meter depth. Several statistics are computed, by one-degree and five-degree squares, for the world ocean at each standard depth level and for various climatological, all-data, compositing periods (annual, seasonal and monthly). The statistics computed include:
- the number of observations of each variable,
- the arithmetic mean (referred to as "unanalyzed mean"),
- the standard deviation about the arithmetic mean of each variable,
- the standard error of the mean of each variable.
These products are in ASCII format, compressed. The CD-ROM includes "decompression utilities" GZIP DOS (for windows) and GZIP UNIX (for most flavors of UNIX and LINUX). "MacGZIP" and "WinZip" will uncompress the files, but they are not provided.
The data used to generate these statistics are available on CD-ROM as the World Ocean Database 2001 (WOD01). Color images of the annual, seasonal and monthly values at standard depths are available on DVD as the World Ocean Atlas Figures 2001.
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