ESOP

Description

During the European Sub Polar Ocean Programme, new technologies, observational approaches and modeling efforts have been employed to better understand the mechanisms governing water masses formation, circulation and oceanic variability in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Seas.

ESOP-I included observational studies of the ocean circulation, the sea ice cover, and the inorganic and organic carbon cycles. Three major modeling studies were involved.

ESOP-2 combined the release of an anthropogenic tracer, the launching of isobaric floats, the observation of standard hydrographic parameters and transient tracers, a complete coverage of the carbon cycle, remotely sensed and directly measured sea ice fluxes, and an integrated small, meso and large scale modeling effort.

The main objectives of the programme have been:

To understand the oceanic thermohaline circulation on meso and large scales and its dependence on surface fluxes of heat, fresh water and momentum.

To study fresh water fluxes into and out of the central Greenland Sea region.

Evaluate the role of convection areas in ocean-atmosphere gas exchange and investigate the role of thermohaline circulation in CO₂ transport.

To use observation to improve and calibrate coupled atmosphere-ocean models.

Data information

View Station maps and histograms per parameter to get a quick overview of the dataset.

The CTD station summary and the bottle station summary provides a list of all the stations where ESOP data was sampled.
The CTD limits file and the bottle limits file provides a max and min valies for all parameters in the datasets.

Also, take a look at the Cruise summery reports to get an overview of the cruises involved with the ESOP project.

Data download

	Bottle & reduced CTD	CTD
ICES	ESO_bot_ice.zip	ESO_ctd_ice.zip
CSV¹	ESO_bot_csv.zip	ESO_ctd_csv.zip
ODV²	ESO_bot_odv.zip	ESO_ctd_odv.zip

1)Comma Separated Values 2)Ocean Data View
All dataset files are zipped with winzip.