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
Some marine mammals travel thousands of kilometres to find their food, continuously diving to great depths. By instrumenting them, it is possible to directly observe their foraging behaviour. Simultaneously, we collect unique oceanographic data in the remote Polar regions.
World map showing the distribution of CTD profiles (i.e. vertical profiles of temperature and salinity) currently available in the MEOP-CTD database (Mar 2024 version). More information on the data distribution can be found on this website.
The MEOP consortium (MEOP stands for "Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole") brings together several national programmes to produce a comprehensive quality-controlled database of oceanographic data obtained in Polar Regions from instrumented marine mammals.
This website presents the MEOP project, and the members of the MEOP consortium. It also makes the quality-controlled MEOP-CTD, MEOP-SMS and MEOP-TDR databases publicly available to the scientific and operational oceanography communities.
Since 2020, AniBOS (Animal Borne Ocean Sensors) has been launched to pursue and further the goals of MEOP on a broader scale. AniBOS is an emerging network of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). AniBOS has been endorsed by the UN Ocean Decade as one of 94 new Decade Actionsin October 2021.