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
How to cite
If you use the MEOP-CTD or MEOP-TDR datasets for a publication, please add the following sentence in the Acknowledgement part:
The marine mammal data were collected and made freely available by the International MEOP Consortium and the national programs that contribute to it. (http://www.meop.net).
Also please cite at least one of the following papers when you use the MEOP-CTD dataset in your published work:
Treasure, A.M., F. Roquet, I.J. Ansorge, M.N. Bester, L. Boehme, H. Bornemann, J.-B. Charrassin, D. Chevallier, D.P. Costa, M.A. Fedak, C. Guinet, M.O. Hammill, R.G. Harcourt, M.A. Hindell, K.M. Kovacs, M.-A. Lea, P. Lovell, A.D. Lowther, C. Lydersen, T. McIntyre, C.R. McMahon, M.M.C. Muelbert, K. Nicholls, B. Picard, G. Reverdin, A.W. Trites, G.D. Williams, and P.J.N. de Bruyn. 2017. Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole: A review of the MEOP consortium. Oceanography 30(2):132–138, doi: 10.5670/oceanog.2017.234. [PDF]
and
Roquet F., Wunsch C., Forget G., Heimbach P., Guinet C., Reverdin G., Charrassin J.-B., Bailleul F., Costa D. P., Huckstadt L. A., Goetz K. T., Kovacs K. M., Lydersen C., Biuw M., Nøst O. A., Bornemann H., Ploetz, J., Bester M. N., Mcintyre T., Muelbert M. C., Hindell M. A., McMahon C. R., Williams G., Harcourt R., Field I. C., Chafik L., Nicholls K. W., Boehme L., and Fedak M. A., 2013. Estimates of the Southern Ocean General Circulation Improved by Animal-Borne Instruments. Geoph. Res. Letts., 40:1-5. doi: 10.1002/2013GL058304. [download PDF]
and
Roquet F., Williams G., Hindell M. A., Harcourt R., McMahon C. R., Guinet C., Charrassin J.-B., Reverdin G., Boehme L., Lovell P. and Fedak M. A., 2014. A Southern Indian Ocean database of hydrographic profiles obtained with instrumented elephant seals. Nature Scientific Data, 1:140028, doi: 10.1038/sdata.2014.28. [download PDF].
Important technical papers about CTD-SRDL data:
A thorough description of the CTD-SRDL technology can be found in :
Boehme L., Lovell P., Biuw M., Roquet F., Nicholson J., Thorpe S. E., Meredith M. P., and Fedak M., 2009. Technical Note: Animal-borne CTD-Satellite Relay Data Loggers for real-time oceanographic data collection. Ocean Sci., 5:685-695. doi: 10.5194/os-5-685-2009 [PDF]
Photopoulou, T., Fedak, M. A., Matthiopoulos, J., McConnell, B., and Lovell, P., 2015. The generalized data management and collection protocol for Conductivity-Temperature-Depth Satellite Relay Data Loggers. Animal Biotelemetry, 3:21. doi: 10.1186/s40317-015-0053-8
The delayed-mode general methodology and estimated accuracy of CTD-SRDL hydrographic data are presented in :
Roquet F., Charrassin J.-B., Marchand S., Boehme L., Fedak M., Reverdin G., and Guinet C., 2011. Validating hydrographic data obtained from seal-borne satellite-relayed data loggers. J. Atmosph. And Ocean. Tech., 28:787-801. doi: 10.1175/2010JTECHO801.1 [PDF]
Siegelman, L., Roquet, F., Mensah, V., Rivière, P., Pauthenet, E., Picard, B., and Guinet, C., 2019. Correction and accuracy of high- and low-resolution CTD data from animal-borne instruments. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. doi: 10.1175/JTECH-D-18-0170.1
National specificities :
For Australian data:
Any users of IMOS data are required to clearly acknowledge the source of the material derived from IMOS in the format:
The seal tracking data are collected by the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). IMOS is a national collaborative research infrastructure, supported by the Australian Government. It is operated by a consortium of institutions as an unincorporated joint venture, with the University of Tasmania as Lead Agent.
For German and South African data:
Primary data are also made available through PANGAEA. Please cite :
• doi10.1594/PANGAEA.150008 for data related to Marion Island (Southern Ocean Indian Sector)
• doi10.1594/PANGAEA.150009 for data related to King George Island (Southern Ocean Atlantic Sector)
• doi10.1594/PANGAEA.150010 for data related to Atka Bay, Drescher Inlet, Filchner Trough (Southern Ocean Atlantic Sector)