MEASO regions

Southern Ocean regions for the Marine Ecosystem Assessment for the Southern Ocean

The MEASO regions divide the Southern Ocean into five sectors and three zones, giving 15 regions for assessment, summary and comparison. A fourth, northern band in each sector (the “T” regions) covers the remaining ocean to 30°S so that any location in the domain falls in exactly one region.

Figure 1: MEASO regions (version 06) in the colours of the MEASO Summary for Policymakers, with the Antarctic continent (grey) cut out. T regions (outside MEASO) are outlined only.

Get the data

Format	Polar (equal area)	Longitude/latitude	EPSG:3031
GeoParquet	measo_regions06.parquet	measo_regions06_ll.parquet	measo_regions06_epsg_3031.parquet
FlatGeobuf	measo_regions06.fgb	measo_regions06_ll.fgb	measo_regions06_epsg_3031.fgb
GeoJSON		measo_regions06_ll.geojson
QGIS style	measo_regions06.qml

Each file has one row per region with columns name, label (e.g. “Antarctic Atlantic”), sector, zone and fill (the region’s colour). See Data for details and stable URLs, and the Use menu for reading the regions in R, Python, DuckDB, the browser and QGIS.

In R, the measoshapes package provides the regions as data sets:

remotes::install_github("AustralianAntarcticDivision/measoshapes")
library(measoshapes)
measo_regions06

How the regions are defined

The regions are built from lines: sector boundaries, three simplified ocean fronts, and the domain edges (85°S to 30°S, all longitudes). Their boundaries are straight lines in longitude/latitude. See Definition.