Free data offered to researchers studying the Mediterranean

Several data products, analysis software packages, and visualization tools have been released by the The Mediterranean Oceanic Data Base (MODB), a group that prepares hydrographic data sets and climatological fields for distribution to scientists working in the Mediterranean Sea. The climatological distributions of temperature and salinity in the Mediterranean that are available account for the regional properties of the water masses(Figure 1). These measurements should help refine the Mediterranean sector of the Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean published by S. Levitus in 1982. The Mediterranean gridded fields are represented in ASCII format on a 1/4‐degree grid and 19 levels on the vertical. The data sets also include the hydrographic profiles from which the analyzed fields were derived.