Sea Salinity in the Australian Region at Standard Depths

ESRI grids provide sea salinity values interpolated to a 0.1-degree spaced grid across the Australian region. The data originates from the CARS2000 climatology, which synthesizes mean and seasonal fields from oceanographic archives like the World Ocean Atlas 98 and CSIRO Marine. CARS2000 maps resolve a mean value and annual sinusoid at each point, covering depths from 0 to 2000 meters.

Use Cases

• Modeling seasonal salinity cycles based on the resolved annual and semi-annual sinusoids.
• Analyzing vertical salinity profiles based on data at depths of 0, 150, 500, 1000, and 2000 meters.
• Creating high-resolution regional maps based on the 0.1-degree interpolated grid.
• Comparing ocean climatologies based on the CARS2000 methodology designed to improve on the Levitus WOA98 Atlas.

Strengths

• Data is interpolated to a high-resolution 0.1-degree spaced grid.
• Includes salinity values at five standard depths: 0, 150, 500, 1000, and 2000 meters.
• Derived from the CARS2000 climatology, which incorporates data from multiple authoritative oceanographic archives.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The description notes that all limitations of the CARS2000 source data apply here, including potential errors near the sea floor for properties that change rapidly.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Linearly interpolated from CARS2000 mean and seasonal fields, which were generated using Loess mapping from oceanographic cast data.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-05 02:42:57.488375; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian region (100-200E, 50-0S), with higher-resolution versions available for the continental shelf.