Developing a New Oxygen Atlas of the World's Oceans Using Data Interpolating Variational Analysis

We present a new global oxygen atlas. This atlas uses all of the available full water column profiles of oxygen, salinity, and temperature available as part of the World Ocean Database released in 2018. Instead of optimal interpolation, we use the Data Interpolating Variational Analysis (DIVA) approach to map the available profiles onto 108 depth levels between the surface and 6800 m, covering more than 99% of ocean volume. This 1/28 × 1/28 atlas covers the period 1955–2018 in 1-yr intervals. The DIVA method has significant benefits over traditional optimal interpolation. It allows the explicit inclusion of advection and boundary constraints, thus offering improvements in the representations of oxygen, salinity, and temperature in regions of strong flow and near coastal boundaries. We demonstrate these benefits of this mapping approach with some examples from this atlas. We can explore the regional and temporal variations of oxygen in the global oceans. Preliminary analyses confirm earlier analyses that the oxygen minimum zone in the eastern Pacific Ocean has expanded and intensified. Oxygen inventory changes between 1970 and 2010 are assessed and compared against prior studies. We find that the full ocean oxygen inventory decreased by 0.84% ± 0.42%. For this period, temperature-driven solubility changes explain about 21% of the oxygen decline over the full water column; in the upper 100 m, solubility changes can explain all of the oxygen decrease; for the 100–600 m depth range, it can explain only 29%, 19% between 600 and 1000 m, and just 11% in the deep ocean.