CARS (CSIRO Atlas of Regional Seas) is a digital climatology, or atlas of seasonal ocean water properties: temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, phosphate and silicate. It comprises gridded fields of mean ocean properties over the period of modern ocean measurement, and average seasonal cycles for that period. It is derived from a quality-controlled archive of all available historical subsurface ocean property measurements - primarily research vessel instrument profiles and autonomous profiling buoys. As data availability has enormously increased in recent years, the CARS mean values are inevitably biased towards the recent ocean state.
CARS2009 covers the full global oceans on a 1/2 degree grid, but until June 2011 only included temperature and salinity fields. The T and S fields were created in July 2009 and were was based on World Ocean Database 2005 (WOD05) [July 2008 Update], surface-pressure-corrected Argo global archives to May 2009, WOCE Global Hydrographic Program (v3.0), and many other datasets available up to 2008. The data was collated from many sources and rigorously screened to form BLUElink Ocean Archive (BOA).
This metadata record describes all CARS parameters, which can then be visualised as a single collection through the portal interface.
