From pole to pole: 33 years of physical oceanography onboard R/V Polarstern

摘要

Measuring temperature and salinity profiles in the world’s oceans is crucial to understanding oceandynamics and its influence on the heat budget, the water cycle, the marine environment and on our climate.Since 1983 the German research vessel and icebreaker Polarstern has been the platform of numerous CTD (conductivity,temperature, depth instrument) deployments in the Arctic and the Antarctic. We report on a uniquedata collection spanning 33 years of polar CTD data. In total 131 data sets (1 data set per cruise leg) containingdata from 10 063 CTD casts are now freely available at doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.860066. During this longperiod five CTD types with different characteristics and accuracies have been used. Therefore the instrumentsand processing procedures (sensor calibration, data validation, etc.) are described in detail. This compilation isspecial not only with regard to the quantity but also the quality of the data – the latter indicated for each dataset using defined quality codes. The complete data collection includes a number of repeated sections for whichthe quality code can be used to investigate and evaluate long-term changes. Beginning with 2010, the salinitymeasurements presented here are of the highest quality possible in this field owing to the introduction of theOPTIMARE Precision Salinometer.