Northwest Atlantic Regional Ocean Climatology version 2

The Northwest Atlantic Ocean (NWA) plays a crucial role in global climate change. The Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current System are the key elements of northward heat transport and the Meridional Overturning Circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean. The NWA includes a resource-rich coastal zone with abundant fisheries and other natural resources. Its economic significance and climatic importance resulted in many observational and research programs spanning many decades. To provide an improved oceanographic foundation and reference for multidisciplinary studies of the NWA, the Regional Climatology Team at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), formerly the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, published the first version of the Northwest Atlantic Regional Climatology (NWARC v1) in 2016 (Seidov et al., 2016). The NWARC v1 was based on the data from the World Ocean Database (WOD), referred as WOD13, published in 2013 (Boyer et al., 2013). A new, updated version of the NWARC v2, now based on the most recent revision of the WOD (WOD18).