Drivers of Seawater Density - Invention

Your Objective

Observe temperature, salinity, and density data from two stations.

Make a prediction on whether temperature or salinity is more important in determining seawater density at each location.
Test this prediction by observing how density changes when temperature or salinity is held constant at the mean value

Select which location to show:

GP: Station Papa Flanking Mooring A (30m)
CE06: Washington Inshore Surface Mooring (1m)

Show calculated density:

Hold Temperature Constant
Hold Salinity Constant

Data Tips

Questions for Thought

Background Information

Click on the images below to learn more about where and how the dataset above was collected.

Dataset Information

Download this Dataset

The data for this activity was obtained from the following CTD instruments:

Recovered datasets for each instrument were downloaded from the OOI data portal, and then averaged into 3-hour bins to create timeseries of temperature, practical salinity, seawater pressure and density. The Python Seawater Library was then used to calculate alternate densities, using the record mean values for temperature and/or salinity, which were also added to the final merged CSV file.

See this Jupyter Notebook for details on how the data for this activity was processed.

Activity Citation: Kumar, A., Rudio, K., Shull, D. & Lichtenwalner, C. S. (2020). Drivers of Seawater Density. OOI Data Labs Collection.