L1 Profile Data

What we call Level 1 Profile Data is any in situ data in a form of a profile (possibly a single value at surface for example). It is especially characterised by the position and date of the profile, the number of levels where some measurements have been done, and the nature of the variable measured. If several variables (i.e. several profiles) are measured at a given location (e.g. through a CTD cast) the ensemble of profiles can be called a station.

Those basic profile data are the primary material from which we construct the data distributed on this website. Collecting and qualifying those data is a huge task, and from the raw measurements to the fully qualified and possibly adjusted data there are certainly several sub levels encompassed into those Level 1 data. For information about our basic material, we give hereunder some of our possible Level 1 data sources. We get them from the main data centers and oceanographic programs around the world, for example :

• ARGO profiler floats dataset :
  ftp link : from Ifremer Coriolis french GDAC, or identically from FNMOC american GDAC. Get data by geographic area in "geo/" or by DAC/Float in "dac/".
  website : the international Argo project homepage


• WOD (World Ocean Database) 2009 (CTD, XBT, MBT at observed levels):
  ftp link : ftp of geographic sorted data from NODC NOAA server
  website : NOAA NODC WOD


• CORA Database: COriolis dataset for Re-Analysis (CORA) gathers quality controlled T/S measurements on observed levels from different data types, on global scale and for about the last 20 years. This dataset is produced in the frame of Coriolis operational oceanography program and the european MyOcean project (see Cabanes et al. 2012 [7] for a reference and details).
  ftp link and website : You can find information and ftp link to get the data (after registration request) from the Coriolis website here (CORA).