A. Valente et al.: A compilation of global bio-optical in situ data 
HZ 
5 
30 
30 
m 
90° = 
480° 
PA 
PA 
gg 
nn 
3-10 ® >40 [chla (mg m‘) 
"Oz ——— ————l 
0° 4905 
—s 
WS 
Figure 8. Global distribution of chlorophyll-a concentration per interval of the observed value. All chlorophyll data were considered, but for 
a given station, HPLC data were selected if available. 
ic 
AR 
le 
EM 
seabass 
10mad 
amt 
ces 
nermaid 
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zalcofi 
‘celter 
ämnt 
be 
ats 
pss 
ara 
naredat 
arcsspp 
awi 
‚arentssea 
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BStOC 
Figure 9. Global distribution of chlorophyll-a@ concentration per data set in the final table. All chlorophyll data were considered, but for a 
given station, HPLC data were selected if available. Crosses show sites from where data of chlorophyll are available in a specific geographic 
location. 
and Gentili, 1996; Morel et al., 2002). The compiled vari- 
ables were “chla_hple” and “rrs” 
32 PBesults 
In this work, several sets of bio-optical in situ data were ac- 
quired, homogenized, and merged into a single unified data 
set. The data set comprises in situ observations between 1997 
and 2021, with a global distribution, and includes the follow- 
ing varlables: “rrs”, “chla”, “aph”, “adg”, “bbp”, “kd”, and 
“tsm”. All observations were processed in such a way that 
chey can be compared directly with satellite-derived ocean 
colour data. The compiled data set corresponds to a table 
with a total of 151673 rows and 3458 columns. Each row 
represents a unique station in space and time, separated from 
the rest by at least 5 min and 200m. For each variable at a 
given station, three metadata strings are provided: ‘“dataset”, 
“subdataset”. and “contributor”. The columns of the table 
attos://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-573 /-2UZ: 
take the form described in Table 1. The data contributors 
are indicated in Table 2. Regarding spectral variables, all 
original wavelengths were preserved, which required many 
unique wavelengths to be maintained in the database. No 
band shifting was performed (though some archived data in 
some data sources may have been merged with nearby wave- 
lengths) and no minimum number of wavelengths per obser- 
vation was imposed. This allowed further manipulation of the 
data set for different purposes. In the following paragraphs, 
the final group of observations is described in terms of each 
variable and the corresponding contributing data sets; how- 
ever, it is important to note that the numbers reported here 
do not reflect the original numbers in each contributing data 
set, since observations close in time and space were aver- 
aged and quality controls were applied. Furthermore, dupli- 
cates across contributing data sets were removed (e.g. NO- 
MAD and others, such as MOBY, were removed from MER- 
MAID: also, data of individual projects, such as PALMER 
Earth Syst. Sei. Data, 14, 5737-5770. 2022