PHC: A Global Ocean Hydrography with a High-Quality Arctic Ocean

A new gridded ocean climatology, the Polar Science Center Hydrographic Climatology (PHC), has been created that merges the 1998 version of theWorld Ocean Atlaswith the new regionalArctic Ocean Atlas.The result is a global climatology for temperature and salinity that contains a good description of the Arctic Ocean and its environs. Monthly, seasonal, and annual average products have been generated. How the original datasets were prepared for merging, how the optimal interpolation procedure was performed, and characteristics of the resulting dataset are discussed, followed by a summary and discussion of future plans.