Water Density Raster Images for the Gulf of Maine

This geodatabase contains water density raster images for the Gulf of Maine that were interpolated from water density (sigma t or kilograms/ meters cubed) point data acquired from the Canadian Fisheries and Oceans/ Bedford Institute of Oceanography's Hydrographic database.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: density_1997_2004_Fall_0m would indicate that this water density raster was interpolated using data from 1997-2004 for the fall at 0 meters (or the surface).

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. The accuracies of these interpolated surfaces were calculated by validating with 25% of the water density points that were previously set aside. These control points are located in the personal geodatabase named Water_Stratification_Points.