CSIRO Atlas of Regional Seas (CARS) - 2009

The CSIRO Atlas of Regional Seas (CARS) is a digital climatology, or atlas of seasonal ocean water properties. It comprises gridded fields of mean ocean properties over the period of modern ocean measurement, and average seasonal cycles for that period. It is derived from a quality-controlled archive of all available historical subsurface ocean property measurements - primarily research vessel instrument casts and autonomous profiling buoys. As data availability has enormously increased in recent years, the CARS mean values are inevitably biased towards the recent ocean state. CARS2009 covers the full global oceans, and includes temperature, salinity, oxygen, nitrate, silicate and phosphate fields. Full documentation and sample images available on the CARS webpage