Water Stratification Raster Images for the Gulf of Maine

We chose to use 50 meters as the lower water density depth because water less than 10 meters may have been subject to wind and convective mixing, and water less than 30 meters may have been influenced by internal waves. Water at 50 meters, however, illustrated the greatest difference in stratification strength (buoyancy frequency squared) between layers in the water column (Brown and Irish, 1993). The naming convention of the raster includes the year (or years) included in the the interpolation, the season, and the depth (in meters).

So for example, the name: ws_1997_2004_Fall would indicate that this water stratification raster was created by subtracting water density rasters that were interpolated using data from 1997-2004 for the fall. The seasons were defined using the same months as the remote sensing data--namely, fall = September, October, November; winter = December, January, February; Spring = March, April, May and Summer = June, July, August.