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6th International XBT Science Workshop, Ostend, Belgium, 18-20 April 2018.
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Corporate Author
Intergovernmental Oceanographic CommissionDate
2018
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The 6th International XBT (Expendable bathythermograph) Science team workshop took place at the IODE Project Office of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, in Ostend, Belgium from 18 to 20 April 2018 following on from the 5th IODE Steering Group for the International Quality Controlled Ocean Database (SG-IquOD) meeting at the same venue. The workshop was divided in oral presentations and plenary discussions, held with the objective of exchanging ideas on how to proceed with the implementation, maintenance, and enhancement of the XBT network. A total of 19 scientists participated (4 remotely) from Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Africa, UK, and the USA. XBTs represent the largest fraction of the temperature profile observations since 1970s until the full implementation of Argo profiling floats in approximately 2005. These historical XBT profiles comprise most of the temperature data base that is used to compute time series of ocean heat content. One focus of the XBT Science team (along with IQuOD) is to improve and understand the accuracy of these historical data so that we can understand the uncertainties in this climatically important time series. The global XBT network is logistically complex and so requires strong collaboration between many organizations and countries (Figure 1). Many of these transects have now been in place for multiple-decades. Today, XBT transects mainly operate in High Density (also referred as High Resolution) and Frequently Repeated modes. High Density transects are occupied at least 4 times per year XBT deployed at approximately 25 km intervals along the ship track. Frequently repeated tracks are occupied at around 18 times per year with XBT deployments at 100 km intervals. The repeat sampling nature of XBT transects along fixed transects makes the XBT profiles our best present observing system for the important boundary current systems (including the Antarctic Circumpolar Current) that convey heat, freshwater and nutrients around the global ocean. XBT observations are currently used mainly to: (i) Monitor the variability of location and transport of key surface and subsurface ocean currents and boundary currents, (ii) Monitor the variability of the meridional heat transport and the Meridional Overturning Circulation across ocean basins, (iii) Provide a significant amount of upper ocean thermal observations, particularly in areas undersampled by other observational platforms, used for global ocean heat content estimates, and (iv) Initialization and validation of numerical ocean forecast models. A strong synergy exists between XBT observations and observations from other platforms, such as altimetry, surface drifters, Argo, etc. the enables more robust scientific analysis.Pages
24pp.Publisher or University
UNESCO-IOCSeries : Nr
IOC Workshop Report;283Resource/Dataset Location
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/Collections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/