Annual Global Ocean Minimum Dissolved Oxygen Concentration and Its Depth From 1960 to 2019

This dataset contains annual gridded estimates of the minimum dissolved oxygen concentration within each oceanic oxygen profile (DOmin) and the corresponding depth of DOmin from 1960 to 2019. The dataset was developed to quantify historical changes in the spatial distribution of oceanic oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) and to support analyses of annual global and regional OMZ areas. The data were generated from more than 1.6 million post-1960 dissolved oxygen profiles compiled from publicly available oceanographic datasets. For each profile, DOmin and DOmin depth were calculated from dissolved oxygen measurements. Annual observations were averaged within spatial grid cells and then mapped globally using geostatistical regression. Auxiliary variables included geographic coordinates and the CMIP6 ensemble-mean DOmin or DOmin-depth fields for the same year. Spatially consistent conditional realizations were used to estimate uncertainty in derived OMZ areas. The dataset includes annual gridded fields of DOmin and DOmin depth. DOmin is reported in μmol kg-1 and DOmin depth is reported in meters. The data cover the global ocean from 1960 to 2019 and are intended for studies of ocean deoxygenation, OMZ variability, climate-change impacts, marine habitat compression, and biogeochemical change. These data support the analyses presented in: Zhou, Y., Gong, H., & Zhou, F. (2022). Responses of Horizontally Expanding Oceanic Oxygen Minimum Zones to Climate Change Based on Observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 49, e2022GL097724. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL097724 Users should cite both this Zenodo dataset and the associated journal article when using the data.