NOC 1.1: National Oceanography Centre Surface Flux Climatology (version 1.1)

This dataset contains climatological monthly mean files of air-sea fluxes on a global grid in netCDF format produced at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC). It includes freshwater flux, heat flux and windstress and selected meteorological variables.

Each data file contains 12 climatological monthly means on a global 1 x 1 grid for a particular flux field:

Heat flux and windstress:

latent heat flux (hfls), net heat flux (hfns), sensible heat flux (hfss), precipitation (pr), net longwave flux (rls), net shortwave flux (rss), wind stress (eastward) (tauu), wind stress (northward) (tauv).

Units are W/m2 for the heat flux and N/m2 for the stress.

Also available are freshwater fields:

evaporation (emy), precipitation (pmy), net evaporation (epmy)

Units are m/yr in each case (divide by 12 to get m/month).

Meteorology fields are:

u10 - 10m wind speed, units m/s

t10 - 10m air temperature, units deg C

q10 - 10m specific humidity, units g/kg

sst - sea surface temperature, units deg C

ana - total cloud amount, units octas

slp - sea level pressure, units mb

The flux fields have been derived from the COADS1a (1980-93) dataset enhanced with additional metadata from the WMO47 list of ships. A full description of the fields is given in The Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) Ocean - Atmosphere, Heat, Momentum and Freshwater Flux Atlas (see link under Docs) and a parallel journal paper (Josey et al, 1999) describes the results of various evaluation studies (see links under Docs).

It is important to note that the quality of the fields has a strong spatial dependence which reflects the global distribution of ship observations. Quality is likely to be high in the well sampled North Atlantic & North Pacific but to decrease in the Southern Hemisphere. In particular, south of 40 S the errors in the fields are likely to be large and we recognise the existence of spurious features which have been generated during the objective analysis of the original raw fields. NOC stress that caution must be taken when interpreting the fields in this region.

In addition, note that the current version of the fields does not give closure of the global heat budget, the imbalance being a global mean net heat gain by the ocean of 29 W/m2. Work was carried out to identify regions in which NOC scientists believe the net heat gain has been overestimated.

Results from several regional comparisons against high quality meteorological buoy data indicate that in those regions for which comparisons have been possible the NOC net heat flux estimates agree well with independent buoy measurements. Hence, NOC have not applied global adjustments to the heat flux

components in order to balance the heat budget at this stage of their analysis. See NOC1.1a for adjusted heat fluxes.

Funding has been received from the Hadley Centre, UK Meteorological Office for the production and analysis of this dataset.

Please note that NOC1.1 - Previously the 'Original' SOC climatology (climatological and individual monthly fields)

Date (Publication): 2014-09-22T03:48:19

Date (Creation): 2014-09-22T03:48:19

Citation identifier: https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/935c64a1c57bba456e036f7f5767c339

Citation identifier: NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC) / 935c64a1c57bba456e036f7f5767c339

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
Unavailable	Josey, Simon	Unavailable	Author
Unavailable	Taylor, Peter K.	Unavailable	Author
Unavailable	Kent, Elizabeth C.	Unavailable	Author
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	Custodian
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	Distributor
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	pointofContact
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	Publisher

Maintenance and update frequency: Not planned

Update scope: Dataset

Keywords

SOC
NOCS
NOC1.1
NOC
ocean
freshwater
winstress
heat flux
air-sea interaction

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

atmospheric conditions

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Access to these data is available to any registered CEDA user. Please Login or Register for a CEDA account to gain access.

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Under the following licence http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/, appropriate use of these data may fall under any use. This message is intended as guidance, always read the full licence. When using these data you must cite them correctly using the citation given on the CEDA Data Catalogue record.

Spatial representation type: Grid

Language: English

Topic category

Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere

Begin date: 1973-01-01T00:00:00

End date: 2005-12-31T00:00:00

Unique resource identifier: WGS 84

Distribution format

Name	Version
File format is COARDS compliant netCDF. Files are compressed (.Z).

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/935c64a1c57bba456e036f7f5767c339	CEDA Data Catalogue Page

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/nocs_flux/data/noc1.1	DOWNLOAD

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://noc.ac.uk/science-technology/earth-ocean-system/atmosphere-ocean/nocs-flux-dataset-archive	NOC1.1 Home page at NOC

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/55571/	Josey, S. A. et al., 1999: New Insights into the Ocean Heat Budget Closure Problem from Analysis of the SOC Air–Sea Flux Climatology

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/19117/	Josey, S.A. et al., 1998: The Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) Ocean - Atmosphere, Heat, Momentum and Freshwater Flux Atlas

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Conformance result

Title: Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services

Date (Publication): 2010-12-08

Statement: Data is provided by NOCS (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) to the BADC for archiving.

Metadata

File identifier: 935c64a1c57bba456e036f7f5767c339 XML

Metadata language: English

Character set: UTF8

Parent identifier: NOCS (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) Flux Datasets: marine surface meteorology, freshwater and heat fluxes.
23443335e20d25df00ab67880b10c31c

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Date stamp: 2025-06-16T02:01:45

Metadata standard name: UK GEMINI

Metadata standard version: 2.3

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (NCAS BADC)		badc@rl.ac.uk	Point of contact

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