Australian XBT Ship of Opportunity gridded data collection

Full description

Since 1983, oceanographers have collected ocean temperature data from the ocean surface to approximately 800 m using Expendable BathyThermograph (XBT) instruments. The data are primarily collected from merchant vessels or research vessels along fixed transects and are freely available via the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN). This repository contains user-friendly gridded data products created from the AODN XBT data collection, enabling easy assessment of oceanographic features such as boundary currents and Antarctic fronts, decadal temperature changes and for use in model assessments.

Lineage: These gridded products are created from IMOS FV01 individual XBT profile files collected along each of 7 fixed transects (High Resolution (HR): PX30, PX32, PX30, IX28 and Frequently Repeated (FR): IX01, IX22-PX11, PX02). The period of data collection is from the earliest date of 1983 to the present and this dataset will be udpated regularly.
Individual instrument files are screened to remove data flagged as 'bad' (flags 3 & 4). Temperature data is put onto a common depth grid (10m) using a gaussian filter and linear interpolation for each profile. Profiles are then grouped into individual occupations of each transect and spatially interpolated accounting for large scale fields and eddy fields. Where large gaps exist between profiles spatially, the data is not interpolated.
For full description of the process, refer to the references and links sections below.