Salinity data collected on the Australian shelf between 1995 to 2014 have been assembled into a single data collection. Profiles, trajectories and timeseries datasets within the 500m depth contour and collected by different organisations have been included. A full list of datasets used to produce this collection is provided below:
The Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS):
Seals CTD profiles
Argo profiles
Glider deployments
CTD Casts performed at National Reference Station
Moorings
AUV deployments
Sensor networks in the Great Barrier Reef
Ship underway
Royal Australian Navy (RAN):
Sea Surface Temperature measurements on NSW coast
The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS):
CTD casts
Defence Science and Technology Organisation:
Glider deployments
Charles Darwin University – Xavier Hoenner:
Hawksbill Turtles
CSIRO Ocean and Atmosphere:
Moorings
Trajectory
Underway
World Ocean Database 2013 (WOD) – standard depth data products:
XBT profiles (XBT)
CTD casts (CTD)
Surface only data (SUR)
Undulating Oceano Recorder (UOR)
Salinity measurements from the different sources have been assembled into a common data structure in a relational database. Quality Control flags have been mapped to a common scheme and associated to each measurements.
Around 25 Million measurements are available in this dataset collection.
Datasets like gliders, moorings or ship underway are sampled at high resolution (e.g.: data every seconds). A sub-sampling approach has been applied to some of these datasets in order to reduce the number of measurements. For example, ship underway data have been averaged over a period of 1 minute and sub-sampled every 5 minutes. Hourly average have been performed on most of the moorings timeseries.
Various quality control checks have been performed on the dataset. A full list of quality control checks is available in the Lineage section of the metadata records.
A national shelf and coastal data atlas has been created using all the salinity measurements. The observations have been binned on an horizontal grid of ¼ degree with standard vertical levels (every 10 meters from the surface to -500m). Moreover, a monthly time range have been used over the period January 1995 to December 2014. The number of observations in each grid square has been determined and additional statistics have been calculated like the mean, the standard deviation, the minimum and maximum values for each grid square.
Two WFS services have been created to publish the individual observations, and the statistics, used to produce the data atlas.
