Seasonal Variation of Surface Salinity Exploration
Your Objective
Use salinity data across different periods of time from the North Pacific Ocean to look if there are patterns over a year.
- Make a prediction about what kind of changes or patterns in salinity you may observe over a year.
- Explore the data below to see what you can observe.
Select a season to zoom to see:
Data Tips
When the site loads, you are able to see the full dataset of salinity data from the Coastal Endurance's Near Shelf Surface Mooring. You can interact with the data by:
- Selecting a different time period (season or full year) to explore the data in ways that interest you.
- Zooming in and out of the data to look at different time scales that interest you by changing the width of the highlighted section of the bottom graph (it loads with all of the data highlighted).
Questions for Thought
- Across what time periods are you able to observe salinity data in this graph?
- What is the first month and year there are data?
- What is the last month and year there are data?
- What changes or patterns did you observe in salinity over this time period in the Northern Pacific Ocean?
- When did you see these changes or patterns?
- What questions do you still have about why salinity changes over time?
Background Information
Click on the images below to learn more about where and how the dataset above was collected.
Dataset Information
The data for this activity was obtained from the following CTD instrument:
- Coastal Endurance, Washington Shelf Surface Mooring @ 7m (CE07SHSM-RID27-03-CTDBPC000)
The above datasets were downloaded from the OOI data portal, and then down-sampled to hourly intervals. The data presented are from the raw record, that is, they are instantaneous measurements that have not been averaged because that would smooth out the variability in the dataset.