Gulf of Mexico Regional Climatology version 2 (NCEI Accession 0222571)

Version 2 of the Gulf of Mexico Regional Climatology(GOM RC) was released in October, 2020. It includes all data from World Ocean Database 2018 (WOD18) and World Ocean Atlas 2018 (WOA18), and provides more detailed thermohaline fields and updates other oceanographic variables that were not available in the previous version. The update substantially revises and extends the original GOM RC, which was released in 2010 in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and updated in 2011 (Boyer et al, 2011). This climatology serves as a physical oceanography baseline for NOAA Gulf of Mexico Data Atlas, and the new high-resolution temperature and salinity decadal climatologies allow researchers to more precisely assess decadal climate change in the Gulf, substantially increasing this climatology’s value for ocean climate studies and other applications.