TheWorld Ocean Atlas (WOA) is adata product of theOcean Climate Laboratory of theNational Centers for Environmental Information (U.S.).[1] The WOA consists of aclimatology offields ofin situocean properties for theWorld Ocean. It was first produced in 1994[2] (based on the earlierClimatological Atlas of the World Ocean, 1982[3]), with later editions at roughly four year intervals in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2018, and 2023.[4]
The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) is based on profile data from theWorld Ocean Database (WOD) Project.[1] The fields that make up the WOA dataset consist ofobjectively-analysedglobal grids at 1°spatial resolution. The fields arethree-dimensional, and data are typicallyinterpolated onto 33 standardisedvertical intervals[5] from the surface (0 m) to theabyssalseafloor (5500 m). In terms oftemporal resolution, averaged fields are produced for annual,seasonal andmonthly time-scales. The WOA fields include oceantemperature,salinity,dissolved oxygen,apparent oxygen utilisation (AOU),percentoxygen saturation,phosphate,silicic acid, andnitrate. Early editions of the WOA additionally included fields such asmixed layer depth andsea surface height.
In addition to the averaged fields of ocean properties, the WOA also contains fields ofstatistical information concerning the constituent data that the averages were produced from. These include fields such as the number of data points the average is derived from, theirstandard deviation andstandard error. A lower horizontal resolution (5°) version of the WOA is also available. The WOA dataset is primarily available ascompressedASCII, but since WOA 2005 anetCDF version has also been produced.
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