This dataset contains the adjusted climatological monthly mean files of air-sea fluxes (heat fluxes only) on a global grid in netCDF format produced at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC).

It was produced by the NERC COAPEC thematic programme project using inverse analysis techniques to remove the global ocean heat budget imbalance of 30 Wm-2 that was present in the NOC1.1 flux climatology.

Each data file contains 12 climatological monthly means on a global 1 x 1 grid for a particular flux field:

latent heat flux (hfls),
net heat flux (hfns),
sensible heat flux (hfss),
net longwave flux (rls),
net shortwave flux (rss).

Units are W/m2.

The flux fields were originally derived from the COADS1a (1980-93) dataset enhanced with additional metadata from the WMO47 list of ships. A full description of the fields is given in The Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) Ocean - Atmosphere, Heat, Momentum and Freshwater Flux Atlas (see link under Docs) and a parallel journal paper (Josey et al, 1999) describes the results of various evaluation studies (see links under Docs).

It is important to note that the quality of the fields has a strong spatial dependence which reflects the global distribution of ship observations. Quality is likely to be high in the well sampled North Atlantic & North Pacific but to decrease in the Southern Hemisphere. In particular, south of 40 S the errors in the fields are likely to be large and we recognise the existence of spurious features which have been generated during the objective analysis of the original raw fields. NOC stress that caution must be taken when interpreting the fields in this region.