Tuesday, 11 January 2005
Database for Ecological Studies of the Arctic Seas: Barents, Kara, Laptev, and White Seas (1810-2001)
The problem of the development of a database for the Arctic Seas is presented. The proposed data format allows one to formalize various components of the ecosystems of the Arctic Seas: oceanographic variables as well as plankton, benthos, fish, sea birds, and marine mammals. One-degree-square statistics for each month were used to provide quality control of the oceanographic data. The database consists of 433,179 stations for the Barents, Kara, Laptev, and White Seas for the period 1810-2003, after exclusion of errors and duplicates. A quarter of these stations also include meteorological data. Monthly climatic fields of temperature and salinity have been plotted in vertical and horizontal dimensions in order to allow the user to visualize the 3D structure of the Arctic Seas. Time-series of water temperature for the period 1870-2001 have been plotted for the Barents Sea, which allows us to document climatic changes over 130 years.
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