The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) is a collection of objectively analyzed, quality controlled temperature, salinity, oxygen, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate means based on profile data from the World Ocean Database (WOD). It can be used to create boundary and/or initial conditions for a variety of ocean models, verify numerical simulations of the ocean, and corroborate satellite data.
World Ocean Atlas Data Download
A new version of the WOA is released in conjunction with each major update to the WOD, the largest collection of publicly available, uniformly formatted, quality controlled subsurface ocean profile data in the world.
WOA 2013World Ocean Atlas 2013 version 2 (WOA13 V2) contains objectively analyzed 1 climatological fields of in situ temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, Apparent Oxygen Utilization (AOU), percent oxygen saturation, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate at standard depth levels for annual, seasonal, and monthly compositing periods for the World Ocean. It also includes associated statistical fields of observed oceanographic profile data interpolated to standard depth levels on 5, 1, and 0.25 grids.
WOA 2009World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09) is a set of objectively analyzed (1 grid) climatological fields of in situ temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, Apparent Oxygen Utilization (AOU), percent oxygen saturation, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate at standard depth levels for annual, seasonal, and monthly compositing periods for the World Ocean. It also includes associated statistical fields of observed oceanographic profile data interpolated to standard depth levels on both 1 and 5 grids.
WOA 2005World Ocean Atlas 2005 (WOA05) is a set of objectively analyzed (1 grid) climatological fields of in situ temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, Apparent Oxygen Utilization (AOU), percent oxygen saturation, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate at standard depth levels for annual, seasonal, and monthly compositing periods for the World Ocean. It also includes associated statistical fields of observed oceanographic profile data interpolated to standard depth levels on both 1 and 5 grids.
The ocean variables included in the atlas are: in-situ temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, apparent oxygen utilization, percent oxygen saturation, dissolved inorganic nutrients (phosphate, nitrate, and silicate), chlorophyll at standard depth levels, and plankton biomass sampled from 0 - 200 meters.
This error does not affect the conclusions of the Science paper, since years 1997 and 1998 were not used to calculate the rate of change of ocean heat content. However, the 1997 and 1998 yearly temperature anomaly fields were made available online. Thus we recommend that people who downloaded these data and used them in their studies should revise their results using the updated temperature anomaly fields.
World Ocean Atlas 2013 version 2 (WOA13 V2) is a set of objectively analyzed (1 grid) climatological fields ofin situ temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, Apparent Oxygen Utilization (AOU), percent oxygensaturation, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate at standard depth levels for annual, seasonal, andmonthly compositing periods for the World Ocean. It also includes associated statistical fields ofobserved oceanographic profile data interpolated to standard depth levels on 5, 1, and 0.25 grids.More info (215 KB).
The WOAselect is a selection tool in which the user can designatea geographic area, depth, and oceanographic variable to view climatological means or related statistics for the given variable.The source data for the climatological means and statistics isthe World Ocean Atlas 2018 (WOA18).
The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) is a set of climatological mean, gridded fields of oceanographic variables based on in-situ measurements from a wide variety of sources. Global, decadal averages of temperature, salinity, oxygen and nutrients are provided at monthly, seasonal and annual averaging periods on 102 standard depth levels from 0 to 5500m, and at 0.25 (temperature, salinity) and 1 (all variables) horizontal resolutions. These fields are widely used for ocean model initialization and validation, climate studies, and operational forecasting. Regional climatologies of temperature and salinity are available at 1/10 for select regions of the global ocean with good data coverage. The WOA is often referred to simply as "Levitus" or the "Levitus Climatology" after its pioneering creator, Sydney Levitus. The WOA generally represents large-scale features of the global ocean quite well but coverage can be inadequate for meaningful gradient and trend calculations in some regions and depths.
The oceanographic analyses described by the WOA13 atlas series expands on earlier works (e.g., World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09), World Ocean Atlas 2005 (WOA05), World Ocean Atlas 2001 (WOA01), World Ocean Atlas 1998 (WOA98), World Ocean Atlas 1994 (WOA94), and Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean (Levitus, 1982)). Previously published oceanographic objective analyses have proven to be highly useful for the oceanographic, climate research, geophysical, and operational environmental forecasting communities. Some of the usages of these data can be in the form of "sea truth" for validation of satellite measurements, for computation of nutrient fluxes by Ekman transport, and for planning oceanographic expeditions among others (Locarnini et al., 2013).
The WOA13 represents the ocean state variables of temperature and salinity with more detail and less uncertainty than previous iterations of the World Ocean Atlas series due to large increases in data holdings and better temporal and spatial coverage coupled with refined analysis and quality control techniques (see Figure 1). WOA13 expanded on previous releases with increased vertical resolution (3x in the upper ocean, 2x below 1500 m.), increased spatial resolution (16x), and the release of the decadal climatologies, which were used to calculate the final 1955-2012 long-term climatological mean fields. In order to further improve the initial release of WOA13, an update, WOA13 version 2 (WOA13v2) has been prepared, which addresses some methodology and quality control concerns surfaced since the initial release of WOA13. Those augments has some effect on the resultant fields from local to global. (Boyer et al., 2015).
A few regions of the World Ocean have significantly better data coverage historically than others, thus opening a possibility to generate regional ocean climatologies on even finer than quarter-degree spatial grids. Therefore, in 2011 the National Oceanographic Data Center (now part of National Centers for Environmental Information) began development of the Regional Climatology Atlases for such regions by generating fields of temperature and salinity on one-, quarter-, and tenths-degree spatial resolution grids with more detailed local quality control procedures than those applied to the World Ocean in all WOA editions. Currently, there are six Regional Climatology (RC) Atlases that have been created and published:
The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) is a data product of the Ocean Climate Laboratory of the National Oceanographic Data Center (U.S.). The WOA consists of a climatology of fields of in situ ocean properties for the World Ocean. It was first produced in 1994[1] (based on the earlier Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean, 1982[2]), with later editions at roughly four year intervals in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2018, and 2023.[3]
The fields that make up the WOA dataset consist of objectively-analysed global grids at 1 spatial resolution. The fields are three-dimensional, and data are typically interpolated onto 33 standardised vertical intervals[4] from the surface (0 m) to the abyssal seafloor (5500 m). In terms of temporal resolution, averaged fields are produced for annual, seasonal and monthly time-scales. The WOA fields include ocean temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, apparent oxygen utilisation (AOU), percent oxygen saturation, phosphate, silicic acid, and nitrate. Early editions of the WOA additionally included fields such as mixed layer depth and sea surface height.
In addition to the averaged fields of ocean properties, the WOA also contains fields of statistical information concerning the constituent data that the averages were produced from. These include fields such as the number of data points the average is derived from, their standard deviation and standard error. A lower horizontal resolution (5) version of the WOA is also available. The WOA dataset is primarily available as compressed ASCII, but since WOA 2005 a netCDF version has also been produced.
The World Ocean Database (WOD) has global ocean observed and standard depth data profiles. The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) has objectively analyzed climatological mean fields on both a quarter-degree and on a one-degree longitude by latitude grids. The gridded analyses are for annual, seasonal, and monthly means of six oceanographic variables: temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, phosphate, and silicate on standard levels (typically at 102 depths, dependent on data availability). The products were derived at the Ocean Climate Laboratory (OCL) of the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC). Development of the World Ocean products began in 1982 and they have been updated in 1994, 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, and 2018. The featured products are now based on the 2018 versions. Some products from older version are still unique.
The WOD is the world's largest profile collection covering the global ocean and contains measurements from 1800 through 2018. The WOA are climatological grids at fixed depths derived from quality checked WOD profiles. This is a recognized world-wide standard and is often referenced in oceanographic research.
This atlas consists of a description of data analysis procedures and horizontal maps of climatological distribution fields of dissolved oxygen (O2), apparent oxygen utilization (AOU), and dissolved oxygen saturation (S2O) at selected standard depth levels of the world ocean on a one-degree latitude-longitude grid. The aim is to illustrate large-scale characteristics of the distribution of dissolved oxygen. The oceanographic data fields used to generate these climatological maps were computed by objective analysis of scientifically quality-controlled historical dissolved oxygen data in the World Ocean Database 2018 collected on or after 1960. Distribution concentration maps are presented for climatological composite periods (annual, seasonal, monthly, seasonal and monthly difference fields from the annual mean field, and the number of observations) at 102 standard depths. We also provide estimates of the basin-scale uncertainty of the WOA18 O2 objectively analyzed annual fields.
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