More than a century of oceanic hydrography observations reveals profound climate-related changes in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean and its Arctic Gateways

Abstract

As part of the new Fisheries Act, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) has made it a priority to disseminate its data publicly. The project proposed here is to create an open-access data product that includes most of the historical temperature and salinity profiles collected in Northwest Atlantic Ocean and its Arctic gateways. This project does not aim to replace a potential database, but rather provides an easily accessible and quality-controlled product that can inform fisheries management and support DFO priorities such as the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management, Marine Spatial Planning and the Blue Economy. The Canadian Atlantic Shelf Temperature-Salinity (CASTS) data product consists of 853 748 individual casts (as of 22 August 2025) collected in a geographical zone corresponding to [35–80° N] and [42–100° W] since 1873. The data sources used to make this product were gathered from multiple sources, including DFO regional archives at the Maurice-Lamontagne Institute (MLI), the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO), and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Center (NAFC). Other sources of data include the Fisheries and Marine Institute of Memorial University, data from international ships of opportunity archived by the Marine Environmental Data Services (MEDS), and the Polar Data Catalog. This data product also offers new opportunities to review the changes in the ocean climate of Atlantic Canada, another priority of the Government of Canada. The analysis of these data collected over more than a century also reveals the profound changes undergone by the Northwest (NW) Atlantic Ocean during that period. Climate highlights include large decadal fluctuations of temperature and salinity throughout the entire zone, as well as sustained warming trends on the Scotian Shelf and the Bay of Fundy since the early 1990s, coinciding with an important freshening on the Newfoundland and Labrador Shelf during the same period. The CASTS data product is available at https://doi.org/10.20383/103.01462.