CORA dataset

CORA3.2 2012 July Sea Surface Temperature

CORA (standing for Coriolis Ocean database ReAnalysis) is a global oceanographic temperature and salinity dataset produced and maintained by the French institute IFREMER. Most of those data are real-time data coming from different types of platforms (research vessels, profilers, underwater gliders, drifting buoys, moored buoys, sea mammals, opportunity ships, ...).

Description

This in-situ dataset produced by the French institute Ifremer in the framework of the European project MyOcean and French project CORIOLIS is a picture of the content of the operational oceanographic database CORIOLIS. This database is the main tool of Coriolis project which is a global data assembly center of in situ data: such as US-GODAE centre of Monterey in California. The latest version of CORA product is v3.3, it covers the years 1990 up to 2011 and has been released in July 2012. Observations are profiles distributed on measured levels (pressure or depth) and organized by dates of measurement and type of platform. Main users of CORA dataset are ocean modelers who needs to constraint and initialize their model. MERCATOR-océan[1] is a privileged partner of CORA dataset since feedbacks from models assimilation (meteorology) are used to check suspicious profiles found thanks to innovation computing. CORA[2] is free of access and can be download via CORIOLIS website[3] in netCDF file format. The main different of CORA dataset with other available datasets is that CORA gives the data on the levels where measurements have been done rather than standard levels such in World Ocean Atlas or ENACT3. In addition data in CORA are retrieved from Coriolis database where each profile is visually checked by specialist operators if suspicious.

Validation procedure

Validation in database

Validation post extraction

Data sources

The CORA dataset is designed for operational oceanography, so most global real time monitoring networks are plugged into this database. The data sources are the following:

Versions

official versions of CORA product
Date of release Time span Comments
CORA1.0 2007 2002-2006 Beta version of the dataset, full years extracted
CORA2.2 2009 1990-2008 Add of validation procedures (climatological checks) and gridding of the data
CORA3.1 2010 1990-2009 Full years updated + 2009 added
CORA3.2 2011 1990-2010 Add of validation procedures (duplicate check, XBT depth correction) integration of sea mammals data, automatisation of the update procedure
CORA3.3 2012 1990-2011 Article[7] submitted to Ocean Science review, add of year 2011, completion of anomalies feedback from objective analysis towards CORA dataset and Coriolis database.
CORA3.4 2013 1990-2011 New ICES CTD data added
CORA4.0 2014 1990-2012 Update of profiles and addition of Time series from drifters, ferrybox, profilers.

References

  1. http://www.mercator.com.fr MERCATOR OCEAN website
  2. http://www.coriolis.eu.org/content/download/10987/73170/file/CORA3_UserManual.pdf
  3. http://www.coriolis.eu.org/Science/Data-and-Products official website of CORIOLIS project
  4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00129.1 Empirical Correction of XBT Data M.Hamon et al 2012
  5. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/
  6. http://www.gosud.org/ GOSUD Website>
  7. http://www.ocean-sci-discuss.net/9/C394/2012/osd-9-C394-2012.pdf, http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/os-9-1-2013

External links