BNSClim hydrographic part (version 1.0)

This is the first version (v1.0) of the hydrographic part of the “Baltic and North Sea Climatology (BNSC)”. The parameters provided here are water temperature and salinity on 105 depth levels. The data product comprises the time period from 1873-2015 and is based on more than one million observational profiles, which were obtained from several different data sources in the region of the Baltic, the North Sea and adjacent areas of the North Atlantic Ocean (15°W-30°E, 47°N-66°N). Intersection of observational data from different data sources is avoided and the in situ data were objected to an elaborate automatic quality control to identify erroneous observations that would bias the data product. Additionally, a correction of the temporal sampling error was applied to minimise the impact of the temporal distribution of the observations on the created temporal mean fields. The data product consists of gridded mean fields of water temperature and salinity. The spatial resolution is 0.25° in meridional and zonal direction. The depth levels are irregularly distributed: for the depth interval from 0 to 50 m the distance between the single depth levels is 5 m. Below 50 m, the distance increases progressively by 1 m to the last depth level of 4 985 m. The dimensions of the data product are 180*76*105 (longitude, latitude, depth). The BNSC climatology consists, on the one hand, of time series of monthly and annual mean values of the hydrographic parameters as fields of box averages. Grid boxes that show no observations are left empty. Based on these time series, decadal monthly mean fields are created for the decades 1956-1965, 1966-1975, 1976-1985, 1986-1995, 1996-2005, 2006-2015 as another part of the data product. Again, gaps remain in observational data-void regions. The third part of the data product results from above mentioned decadal mean fields: horizontally Interpolated Fields by Application of the Method of Objective Analysis. This subset does not contain gaps. Available parameters: box averages: monthly and annual mean, resp. standard deviation, number of observations decadal box averages: decadal monthly mean, resp. standard deviation, mean year, standard deviation to mean year, number of years decadal interpolated mean: interpolated monthly mean, absolute median deviation, number of bins, first guess, relative interpolation error, mean year, mean distance The products are publicly available at the ICDC portal (https://icdc.cen.uni-hamburg.de/1/daten/ocean/bnsc/)