This is version v1.1 of the hydrographic part of the "Baltic and North Sea Climatology (BNSC)".

It turned out that the original hydrographic data product of the BNSC

(BNSClim hydrographic part (Version 1.0)) was erroneous. The errors occurred by accidentally reading obsolete files in two of the intermediate steps of the production procedure. By this, the basis of observations was altered. This happened after the quality control and interpolation of the observations on standard depths, in the step where the observations are sorted into the chosen grid (this affects temperature and salinity) and in the following step, the correction of the temporal sampling error (this affects only salinity).

These errors were corrected in this Version 1.1.

The parameters provided are water temperature and salinity on 105 depth levels. The data product comprises the time period from 1873-2015 and is based on more than one million observational profiles, which were obtained from several different data sources in the region of the Baltic, the North Sea and adjacent areas of the North Atlantic Ocean (15°W-30°E, 47°N-66°N). Intersection of observational data from different data sources is avoided and the in situ data were objected to an elaborate automatic quality control to identify erroneous observations that would bias the data product. Additionally, a correction of the temporal sampling error was applied to minimize the impact of the temporal distribution of the observations on the created temporal mean fields.

The data product consists of gridded mean fields of water temperature and salinity. The spatial resolution is 0.25° in meridional and zonal direction. The depth levels are irregularly distributed: for the depth interval from 0 to 50m the distance between the single depth levels is 5m. Below 50m, the distance increases progressively by 1m to the last depth level of 4985m. The dimensions of the data product are 180*76*105 (longitude, latitude, depth). The BNSC climatology consists, on the one hand, of time series of monthly and annual mean values of the hydrographic parameters as fields of box averages. Grid boxes that show no observations are left empty. Based on these time series, decadal monthly mean fields are created for the decades 1956-1965, 1966-1975, 1976-1985, 1986-1995, 1996-2005, 2006-2015 as another part of the data product. Again, gaps remain in observational data-void regions.

The third part of the data product results from above mentioned decadal mean fields: horizontally interpolated fields by application of the method of objective analysis. Consequently, this subset does not contain gaps.

Available parameters:

box averages: monthly and annual mean, resp. standard deviation, number of observations

decadal box averages: decadal monthly mean, resp. standard deviation, mean year, standard deviation to mean year, number of years

decadal interpolated mean: interpolated monthly mean, absolute median deviation, number of bins, first guess, relative interpolation error, mean year, mean distance

The products and a description of the differences between v1.0 and v1.1 are publicly available at the ICDC portal ( https://icdc.cen.uni-hamburg.de/1/daten/ocean/bnsc/ )