QuOTA dataset (Quality-controlled Ocean Temperature Archive)

Brief description

The QuOTA dataset is a collection of ocean temperature profiles from the Indian Ocean and Tasman Sea surrounding Australia. The data was collected together from various sources and instrument types, duplicate checked and quality controlled. Automated and expert/manual quality control was performed on the data. The automated quality control is discussed in Gronell, A., and S.E. Wijffels. 2008. A Semiautomated Approach for Quality Controlling Large Historical Ocean Temperature Archives. Journal Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. v25, pp990-1003.

Temperature data from the QuOTA project are available in 5m bins in netcdf format, 2m bins by WMO squares and in a gridded format (described in documents list). They are also available in full resolution netcdf format as described in attached documentation.

Full resolution netcdf:
QuOTATasmanSea.tar.gz
QuOTAIndianOcean.tar.gz
Format documented in 'MQNC_format.doc'

2m binned netcdf:
Tasman2mbinsWMOsquares.zip
IndianOcean2mbinsWMOsquares.zip
Format documented in 'TZ_5m_2m_bins_header_description.doc'

5m binned netcdf:
TasmanSea_TZ_5mbin_profiles.nc.gz
IndianOcean_TZ_5mbin_profiles.nc.gz
Format documented in 'TZ_5m_2m_bins_header_description.doc'

Gridded data netcdf:
QuOTA_gridded_monthly_nc.gz
Format documented in 'griddedQuotadesc.doc'

The dataset is useful as a high-quality upper ocean temperature dataset in quality control test validation, among other uses.
The data collected covers the years 1772-2005. The project end was approximately 2008.

The paper describing the QuOTA quality control process is available in the CSIRO Research Publications Repository (RPR): http://hdl.handle.net/102.100.100/118409?index=1
Lineage: Ocean temperature profiles were collected from:
NOAA World Ocean Database, 2001
CSIRO XBT data
Bureau of Meteorology XBT data
Far Seas Fisheries data (Japan)
NOAA AOML XBT datasets
GTSPP datasets
Scripps XBT datasets
WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) datasets
Insititut de Recherche pour le Developpement, Noumea, New Caledonia
Early CSIRO Research voyages
Early Argo profiling float data