A digital temperature atlas for the Norwegian Sea

Abstract

The first digital temperature atlas for the Norwegian Sea (Nordic Seas/GIN Sea) is described and examples of applications given. The atlas is intended mainly to make historical temperature values available to fisheries oceanographers, fisheries biologists, and stock assessment scientists in a structured, uniform format. It should also be of interest to physical oceanographers, climate researchers, and numerical modellers, and will be of relevance to remote-sensing analyses. The atlas, made freely available for scientific non-commercial purposes, is based on interpolation from 59 496 mainly Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic hydrographic stations. It consists of gridded temperature fields for the area 20°W-20°E 60-80°N, with a spatial resolution of 1/2° longitude by 1/3° latitude. It covers the quarters January-March, April-June, July-September, and October-December for each year from 1990 to 2007 at 28 depth levels from 0 to 500 m. Two versions of the atlas were produced, one based solely on actual data and one where cells with "missing" values were filled from World Ocean Atlas 05 climatology. Suggested applications include the mapping of horizontal fields and vertical sections, initiation or verification of numerical models, comparisons with SST values from remote sensing, calculations within any chosen latitude-longitude- depth box, and the estimation of the ambient temperatures fish experience when the atlas is used in conjunction with information on fish distribution. © 2010 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.