The Navy Ocean-Temperature Temporal-Variability model

The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) has completed its initial development of the worldwide Ocean-Temperature Temporal-Variability Model as part of its general ocean climatology program and as an adjunct to its centralized compilation of oceanographic data. The development of a temporal variability model to match the resolution of the Navy´s standard climatologies (nominally a 30´ grid, but sometimes as fine a resolution as a 10´ grid) was beset by many problems, the most serious being the scarcity of data, data quality, and removal of spatial variability. Since individual editing of the more than 4 million vertical profiles in NAVOCEANO´s data bank is unrealistic, semi-automated techniques were employed. Spatial variability was estimated using the Navy´s standard temperature climatology, the Generalized Digital Environmental Model. These estimates were used to allow the sampling space to increase in regions of low spatial variability and to decrease in areas of high spatial variability, resulting in realistic estimates of variability. As new data are added to the master data bank, the variability model will be used to tag anomalous data for further editing and ultimately used to make periodic updates to the variability model itself