Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) gridded data products

• Published in: Earth System Science Data
• Main Authors: Sabine, Christopher L., Pérez, Fiz F., Ríos, Aida F., Yoshikawa-Inoue, H.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2013
• Subjects: Bergen; Canada; Norway; Alfred Wegener Institute
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/91799; https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-5-145-2013

Sabine, C. L. et al. As a response to public demand for a well-documented, quality controlled, publically available, global surface ocean carbon dioxide (CO2) data set, the international marine carbon science community developed the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT). The first SOCAT product is a collection of 6.3 million quality controlled surface CO2 data from the global oceans and coastal seas, spanning four decades (1968–2007). The SOCAT gridded data presented here is the second data product to come from the SOCAT project. Recognizing that some groups may have trouble working with millions of measurements, the SOCAT gridded product was generated to provide a robust, regularly spaced CO2 fugacity (fCO2) product with minimal spatial and temporal interpolation, which should be easier to work with for many applications. Gridded SOCAT is rich with information that has not been fully explored yet (e.g., regional differences in the seasonal cycles), but also contains biases and limitations that the user needs to recognize and address (e.g., local influences on values in some coastal regions). SOCAT is promoted by IOCCP, the Sur- face Ocean Lower Atmosphere Study, and the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research program. Douglas Wallace (Dalhousie University, Canada and former SOLAS chair) has strongly encouraged SOCAT. Support has been received from the University of Bergen (Norway), the Bjerknes Centre for Cli- mate Research (Norway), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (United States), the University of Washington (United States), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (United States), the University of East Anglia (United Kingdom), PANGAEA – Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental data (Germany), the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (Ger- many), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), the CarboOcean (Norway, GOCE 511176-1) and CarboChange (Norway, FP7 264879) projects of the European Union, the US National Science Foundation (United States, ...