Product III: Temperature and Salinity Monthly Fields

In the Arctic Region, the monthly fields were created by fitting the Winter and Summer PHC 3.0 fields to a cycloid-sinusoid function. Outside of the Arctic Region, the monthly fields mimic those found in NODC's WOA. You'll find more details about how we created these fields by clicking on the PHC 2.1 link found on the PHC Technical Details page of this site.

A Special Note About These Monthly Fields

Note that in PHC 3.0, the average of the monthly fields March, April, and May is not necessarily identical to the seasonal MAM fields. Why is this? PHC2.0: The winter Tmin/Smax is set at mid-April. This means that the average of the monthly fields M, A, and M is not necessarily the same as the seasonal winter MAM field. PHC 2.1: This was corrected by iterating the monthly cycloid function until monthly and seasonal fields were identical. Unfortunately, this sometimes involves a freezing point correction (see link HERE) which can lead to a rather sharp temporal discontinuity between months, e.g., very rapid and discontinuous warming from May to June. PHC 3.0: These discontinuities are more troublesome to us than maintaining strict consistency between monthly and seasonal fields, so we modified the PHC 2.1 method slightly in PHC 3.0: We corrected to freezing when the iteration creates sub-freezing values, but we did not then make corrections so that monthly averages equal the seasonal fields.

     0    400    
    10    500   
    20    600    
    30    700    
    50    800    
    75    900    
   100   1000    
   125   1100    
   150   1200    
   200   1300
   250   1400
   300   1500

Specifics

• Our data fields are global, and are stored in 1X1 degree bins, exactly analogous to the WOA (i.e. Levitus) data structure (described in detail on the data download page).
  
• All of our temperature fields are in situ.
  
• Temperature is in units of Celsius, while salinity is parts per 1000

  ---

  PHC 3.0 Monthly Graphics

  
  

  

  Return to Table of Contents