Read the Sall?e Mixed layer depth climatology.

readmld(date, xylim = NULL, returnfiles = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

date

date to extract, can only be a climatology month

xylim

extent specification

returnfiles

return the file details only

...

ignored

Value

RasterBrick

Details

Information from JB Sallee (2013-06-06) is below, and an example to read and display it in R. A recently updated dataset using the most recent Southern Ocean observation, with updated gridding analysis so it should be better and have appropriate land mask: ftp://ftp.nerc-bas.ac.uk/jbsall/MLfitted_SO.mat This is a compilation of ocean observations: a compilation of 225389 profiles from the Argo program and 106682 profiles from all kind of different ships and PIs. This is not model evaluation. This is likely the best estimate of monthly MLD , because it uses the largest number of observations. There is no observational products with time variability because the Southern Ocean only started to be observed (at basin scale) in this last decade. No observation product can give a temporal evolution at basin scale. Model estimate could be use, but model are known to perform particularly badly in the surface layer so the mixed-layer is always problematic from model. Another possibility could be to use some reanalysis product like that Met-Office product (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/en3/data/EN3_v2a/download_EN3_v2a.html), but this is an objective analysis of available observation, so in the southern Ocean before 2002 (when Argo started), there is not much, so the results will be strongly dominated by the climatology (World ocean Atlas). Unfortunately there is no good answer for time variability of MLD.