Thermodynamics of water, vapor, ice, and seawater

The SCOR/IAPSO Working Group 127 was founded in 2005 and charged with the development of a new, comprehensive, highly accurate, and consistent standard formulation of seawater thermodynamics for oceanography. This task was approached in cooperation with the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS) for a joint standard with industrial applications. In addition to the available standard for fluid water, IAPWS-95, new formulations for ice, IAPWS-06, and the thermodynamics of seawater, IAPWS-08, have been developed, supplemented by a redefinition of salinity, the Reference-Composition Salinity Scale 2008. In this paper the starting situation is described, the requirements to be met during the development process are studied, and the properties of the final formulations are briefly characterized.