Over 800,000 vertical profiles of Temperature and Salinity have been collected since 2004 in the World Ocean by attaching tags on marine mammals, such as Southern elephant seals.
In this website, you will find information about the marine mammal tagging programs, and an access point to the publicly available databases.
Please let us know if you are using our data. You can contact us by mail to info@meop.net if you have any question.
The MEOP data portal
Content of the website
New release of the MEOP-CTD database
Saturday, 11 November 2017
A new release of the MEOP-CTD database is now available. In this new release, about 80 CTD-SRDL tags have been added.
The data processing has been improved, with in particular two additional steps ensuring a better accuracy of salinity data:
- A thermal cell effect correction has been applied on the entire database. Details of the method can be found in the following submitted manuscript:
Mensah, V., Roquet, F., Picard, B., Pauthenet, E., Guinet, C., 2017. A correction methodology for the thermal mass induced-errors of CTD tags mounted on marine mammals. In review in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technologies. [PDF] - A density inversion removal algorithm is also applied, which seeks the minimum adjustment on the salinity profile to achieve neutral stability. The method is described in: Barker, P. M. and McDougall, T. J., 2017. Stabilizing Hydrographic Profiles with Minimal Change to the Water Masses. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 34:1935-1945. doi: 10.1175/JTECH-D-16-0111.1
New data formats are also proposed, which hopefully will facilitate the use of our database by the largest number. In particular, a netCDF file version of data with profiles interpolated on a regular vertical grid is now available. Furthermore, the csv format is now proposed on a regular vertical grid as well.
If you want to learn more about the MEOP consortium, please read the recently published paper “Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole: A Review of the MEOP consortium” by Anne Treasure et al. published in Oceanography.
And don’t hesitate to send us feedbacks on your use of the MEOP-CTD database !!
Finally, you can follow the MEOP project on ResearchGate if you want to be the first to hear about the latest news.
Fabien and the MEOP consortium