What is it about?
Historical salinity profiles in the ocean are much scarcer that temperature data. One method to estimate salinity using temperature profiles is developed and compared to three other methods. This new method takes into account seasonality of the data, and improves over previous methods. The sensitivity of the ocean heat and freshwater transport to the different salinity methods is explored.
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Why is it important?
Most of the historical ocean profile data provide only temperature. Still some of such instruments (ex. expendable bathythermograph, XBT) are still largely used, and they need a method to estimate salinity to infer density changes in the ocean. This paper develops a method that provides a good quality of salinity profile estimates only from temperature data. This is possible because temperature and salinity data in the ocean are largely conservative.
Perspectives
This method will be used in several studies of ocean currents using expendable bathythermograph data. There is also potential to use this method to improve ocean data assimilation.
Dr. Marlos Goes
Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An Updated Estimate of Salinity for the Atlantic Ocean Sector Using Temperature–Salinity Relationships, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, September 2018, American Meteorological Society,
DOI: 10.1175/jtech-d-18-0029.1.
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