Met Office Hadley Centre observations datasets

Hadley Centre global ocean analyses (HadGOA): Download

NetCDF files of HadGOA gridded analyses will be available from this page soon. In the meantime, we include text files of the time series values from Palmer et al.(2007) for plotting purposes. Each file contains the decimal year and an unfiltered and smoothed monthly anomaly series for each ocean basin (Globe, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean).

Missing data are assigned the dummy value of -99.9. The FORTRAN-style statement used to format the numerical values in the text files is: FORMAT='(F8.2,1X,8(F8.4,1X))'.

Global 0-700m heat content anomaly time series

The global 0-700m annual heat content anomalies were calculated by applying the HadGOA processing system to version 2a of the EN3 dataset with the XBT bias adjustments from Table 1 of Wijffels et al. (2008) applied. Anomalies are relative to 1993-2002. Uncertainties due to the observational sampling (estimated using the method of Palmer and Brohan, 2009) and that due to the uncertainty in the XBT bias corrections (estimated using a bootstrap technique) were combined to give overall estimates of uncertainties in the anomalies. Since the Wijffels et al. (2008) bias adjustments are not defined after 2005 there is large uncertainty in what the bias adjustment to the XBT data should be in recent years, and this is reflected in large uncertainties in the anomalies.

The time series is provided in a text file with three columns. The first column contains the year, the second the heat content anomaly (J), and the third the standard error in that value. Note that the first row of the file also contains this information about the columns.

Global 0-700m annumal heat content anomalies relative to 1993-2002

References

Palmer, M. D. and P. Brohan, 2009, Estimating sampling uncertainty in fixed-depth and fixed-isotherm estimates of ocean warming, submitted to International Journal of Climatology

Wijffels, S., J. Willis, C. M. Domingues, P. Barker, N. J. White, A. Gronell, K. Ridgway and J. A. Church, 2008, Changing expendable bathythermograph fall rates and their impact on estimates of thermosteric sea level rise, Journal of Climate, 21, 21, 5657-5672, DOI:10.1175/2008JCLI2290.1

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