Gridded Values of Conservative Temperature and Absolute Salinity Around Antarctica averaged for the depth range 300 m to min([water depth, 1000]) m

• Main Authors: Howard, Susan L., Little, Chris, Sun, Qiang, Padman, Laurence
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) Data Center 2022
• Subjects: Antarctic Continental Shelf; CMIP6; Salinity; Temperature; Physical Oceanography; Cryosphere; Oceans; Antarctica; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.15784/601516; https://www.usap-dc.org/view/dataset/601516

This dataset contains NetCDF files of two-dimensional gridded fields of hydrographic properties, Conservative Temperature (CT) and Absolute Salinity (SA), around Antarctica, depth-averaged for the depth range 300 m to min([water depth, 1000]) m from 38 CMIP6 models, the World Ocean Atlas 2018, and our own product developed from the World Ocean Database. These fields are designed to represent the hydrography of deeper water masses on the Antarctic Continental Shelf (ACS), where typical water depths are 400-600 m, and the intermediate-depth water off the continental shelf. The dataset includes a high-resolution polar-stereographic grid (2 x 2 km) of Southern Ocean geometry, including water depth, elevation of the land and ice-sheet surface (including ice shelves), a mask (identifying water, land and grounded ice, and ice shelves), and offshore distance from the continental shelf break. An example MATLAB script for accessing the grids and plotting them is included. The primary purpose of this dataset is to provide simplified 2-D hydrographic fields that can be used to assess the performance of climate models for the ACS, focusing on the depth range that affects most basal melting of Antarctica’s ice shelves.