Upper ocean thermal structure of the eastern tropical pacific. Technical report

A rigorous quality control (QC) procedure developed to assure the research quality of upper ocean thermal data, mainly from expendable bathythermographs, is described in detail. For a 15 year period (1979-93) 212,891 stations from five data sources (National Oceanographic Data Center, Joint Environmental Data Analysis Center, southeast Pacific, Navy declassified, and Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere Subsurface Data Center) were originally processed, of which 113,589 profiles were kept after rejecting duplicates and submitting the data to the scientific QC process. The accepted temperature-depth profiles were binned into boxes of 2 deg latitude by 5 deg longitude. The climatology and bimonthly thermal fields (sea surface temperature, temperature at 50 m, temperature at 100 m, temperature of the 0-400 m layer, 20 C isotherm depth, and 15 C isotherm depth) are mapped.