EWG Arctic Ocean Atlas: Decadal Temperature and Salinity Fields

More than 1.3 million individual observations from Russian and western drifting stations, ice breakers, and airborne expeditions underpin this joint U.S.-Russian atlas. It provides gridded mean fields for the Arctic Ocean across the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including temperature, salinity, density, dynamic height, and Atlantic water layer depth. The dataset is a foundational climatology product, though the original point observations are not included.

Use Cases

• Analyzing decadal shifts in Arctic Ocean temperature and salinity based on gridded mean fields.
• Mapping the depth of the Atlantic water layer across different historical periods.
• Providing a historical climatology baseline for validating ocean or climate models.
• Studying seasonal differences in ocean properties using the separate winter and summer volumes.

Strengths

• Derived from a substantial observational base of over 1.3 million individual temperature and salinity measurements.
• Provides synthesized, gridded products for four consecutive decades (1950s-1980s), enabling temporal analysis.
• Represents a major international collaboration, compiled by specialists from the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan with U.S. and Russian partners.

Limitations

• The original individual observations used to create the gridded fields are not provided and are unavailable.
• Metadata completeness is low; column names, row counts, and precise data formats are unspecified across sources.
• Conflicting 'last updated' dates (1993 vs. 2026) suggest potential metadata inconsistencies between platforms.

Provenance

Source

Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, with Russian and U.S. partners under the NOAA@NSIDC Environmental Working Group (EWG).

Collection Method

Compilation and gridding of observations from drifting stations, ice breakers, and airborne expeditions.

Time Range

1950s to 1980s

Freshness

2026-04-10 03:49:50.415159

Geography

Arctic Ocean