This dataset consists of measurements of density, electrical conductivity, sound velocity and travel time, salinity, depth and temperature of the water column. The data were acquired from the RV Falcon Spirit, the Plymouth University vessel. The small 14m catamaran was used daily from 13 May 2012 to 24 May 2012 in the Celtic Sea, off the Cornish coast, with the idea to capture high-quality, spatially-resolved field data ahead of the Wave Hub construction. Measurements were collected using CTDs, moored temperature loggers, ADCP, VMADCP and towed minibat CTD. These cruises formed the field component of NERC Discovery Science project "Wave Hub baseline study". The aims of the research were to obtain a detailed oceanographic study at the Wave Hub site and surrounds - covering the whole range of physical, chemical and biological parameters before the deployment of Wave Hub infrastructure and wave energy devices – and to ensure data acquisition in time and space to allow development of physical and ecosystem models at scales relevant to wave arrays. Ultimately models will make predictive assessments of the extent, timescales and intensity of ecosystem impacts and perturbation resulting from implementation of wave energy arrays. Other aims include: engagement of environmental economists to ensure the data can be used to develop economic valuation estimates of critical life-supporting ecosystem services at scales appropriate to arrays of wave devices for comparison with other uses of marine space and to address questions that have arisen directly in respect of marine renewable energy development and sustainable use of marine resources. The Discovery Science project was composed of Standard Grant reference NE/I015094/1 as the lead grant with child grants NE/I015183/1 and NE/I015108/1. The lead grant, NE/I015094/1, ran from 01 August 2010 to 31 July 2012, with Dr Ricardo Javier Torres, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, as principal investigator. The child grant NE/I015183/1 ran from 01 August 2010 to 31 July 2011, led by Professor Michael Richard Belmont, University of Exeter. The second child grant, NE/I015108/1, ran from 03 December 2010 to 31 July 2012, led by Dr Philip John Hosegood, University of Plymouth. All data detailed here were received by BODC as raw files from the RV Falcon, processed and quality controlled using in-house BODC procedures. Towed undulator CTD data and temperature logger data have been processed to completion and are available online on the BODC website. The remaining data will be made available in the near future.

A collection of raw format seafloor visual images acquired during a survey within the Greater Haig Fras Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ), central Celtic Sea, in 2012. This was the first in a series of surveys to be conducted in this location. A camera system mounted on the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Autosub6000 was deployed during RRS Discovery cruise 377/8 (D377/8), and images were collected from four 4.7 km transect lines. The raw images are provided in this collection, available on request. The images are provided in a raw format unique to the Grasshopper 2 camera system. The aim of the survey was to undertake high-resolution acoustic seabed mapping and visual imagery in a Marine Protected Area, in order to highlight the capability of AUV technology for offshore seabed mapping and benthic assemblage assessment. The work was initially undertaken as part of a Defra-funded project "Investigating the feasibility of utilizing AUV and Glider technology for mapping and monitoring of the UK MPA network (MB0118)", Case study 2: Shallow-water AUV mapping off SW UK (https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/500733/), and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded Autonomous Ecological Surveying of the Abyss project (NE/H021787/1), involving scientists from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), UK. Other supporting datasets available on request include AUV-based multibeam bathymetry, sidescan sonar and CTD data.

This dataset consists of measurements of underway meteorology, navigation and sea surface hydrography. The data were collected on RRS Discovery cruise DY051 through the Goban Spur and Rockall Trough areas of the Northeast Atlantic. The cruise spanned the 13th of May to the 3rd of June 2016. Navigation data were collected using an Applanix POSMV system and meteorology and sea surface hydrography were collected using the NMF Surfmet system. Both systems were run through the duration of the cruise, excepting times for cleaning, entering and leaving port, and while alongside. The data were collected as part of the 'MAC-EXP: Development of a pressurised sampling, experimentation and cultivation system for deep-sea sediments' project. The project aims to develop a flexible, cost-effective alternative to in situ experimentation: a pressure-coring, experimentation and cultivation system that enables studies of deep-sea prokaryote biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, under ambient or manipulated pressure, temperature and oxygen conditions from any medium-sized oceangoing research ship with coring capability. This Multiple-Autoclave-Coring and Experimentation system (MAC-EXP) will aim to provide the possibility to systematically test the influence of environmental parameters, such as pressure, oxygen availability or pH on deep-sea organisms and their biochemistry, as well as on rates and pathways of biogeochemical and geomicrobial processes. The system will also aim to allow pioneering work in the field of marine biodiscovery: secondary metabolites from marine microorganisms are a rich source of chemical diversity and several marine-microbe-derived compounds are now in clinical trials. Funding was provided by NERC Standard grants NE/I023465/1 (lead) and NE/I024232/1. The lead grant covered 01 February 2013 to 31 December 2016 and the child grant covered 01 April 2012 to 31 March 2015. Professor Ursula Witte of University of Aberdeen, Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences was the principal investigator for the lead grant. Professor Ronald J Parkes of Cardiff University School of Earth and Ocean Sciences was the principal investigator for the child grant. The data have not yet been received by BODC.

The data set comprises those data collected on UK World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) cruises. The cruises completed to date have collected data either in the North Atlantic (RRS Charles Darwin 58, 59, 62, 62a, 68 and 78; RRS Discovery 223, 230 and 233) or in the Southern Ocean (RRS Discovery 199, 200, 201, 207, 213 and 214; RRS James Clark Ross 0a, 0b, 10, 16 and 27). Conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) data are held from all 20 cruises. 14 out of the 16 shipborne acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) data sets are held, those from RRS Discovery 230 and RRS James Clark Ross 0b are still to be received. 4 out of the 6 lowered ADCP data sets are held, those from RRS Discovery 230 and 233 are still to be received. 3 out of the 4 SeaSoar data sets are held, with that from RRS Discovery 223 still to be received. 12 out of 13 eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) data sets are held, with that from RRS James Clark Ross 0a still awaited. All main water bottle data sets have been received apart from chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) tracer data from RRS Discovery 223, 230 and 233. All of the main underway data sets thermosalinograph, meteorology, etc.) are held apart from thermosalinograph data from RRS James Clark Ross 0b.

The GEBCO_2019 Grid is a global continuous terrain model for ocean and land with a spatial resolution of 15 arc seconds. The grid uses as a ‘base’ Version 1 of the SRTM15_plus data set (Sandwell et al). This data set is a fusion of land topography with measured and estimated seafloor topography. It is largely based on version 11 of SRTM30_plus (5). Included on top of this base grid are gridded bathymetric data sets developed by the four Regional Centers of The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, and from a number of international and national data repositories and regional mapping initiatives. The GEBCO_2019 Grid represents all data within the 2019 compilation. The compilation of the GEBCO_2019 Grid was carried out at the Seabed 2030 Global Center, hosted at the National Oceanography Centre, UK, with the aim of producing a seamless global terrain model. The majority of the compilation was done using the 'remove-restore' procedure (Smith and Sandwell, 1997; Becker, Sandwell and Smith, 2009 and Hell and Jakobsson, 2011). This is a two stage process of computing the difference between the new data and the ‘base’ grid and then gridding the difference and adding the difference back to the existing ‘base’ grid. The aim is to achieve a smooth transition between the 'new' and 'base' data sets with the minimum of perturbation of the existing base data set. The data sets supplied in the form of complete grids (primarily areas north of 60N and south of 50S) were included using feather blending techniques from GlobalMapper software. The GEBCO_2019 Grid has been developed through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. This is a collaborative project between the Nippon Foundation of Japan and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). It aims to bring together all available bathymetric data to produce the definitive map of the world ocean floor by 2030 and make it available to all. Funded by the Nippon Foundation, the four Seabed 2030 Regional Centers include the Southern Ocean - hosted at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany; South and West Pacific Ocean - hosted at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand; Atlantic and Indian Oceans - hosted at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA; Arctic and North Pacific Oceans - hosted at Stockholm University, Sweden and the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, USA).

The Christchurch Harbour Macronutrients Project is one of four consortium projects funded by the NERC through the Macronutrient Cycles Programme. The overall goal of the Macronutrients Programme is to quantify the scales (magnitude and spatial/temporal variation) of Nitrogen and Phosphorus fluxes and the nature of transformations through the catchment under a changing climate and a perturbed Carbon cycle. ‘The catchment’ is defined as covering exchanges between the atmospheric, terrestrial and aqueous environments, with the limit of the aqueous environment being marked by the seaward estuarine margin. The aim of the consortium research project is to better understand the behaviour of macronutrients over a range of temporal and spatial scales including the effect of storm events in the Hampshire Avon and Stour rivers and Christchurch Harbour estuary in Dorset. Data collection spans from October 2012 to January 2017. The Christchurch Harbour Macronutrients Project intensively monitored the river inputs and exchange of nutrients at the estuary mouth as well as looking at sediment re-suspension and the role of phytoplankton in macronutrient cycling within the estuary. By using a number of state of the art continuous monitoring techniques and modelling approaches, the scientists produced an accurate assessment of the impact of nutrients entering the estuary during short term storm increased flows in the two rivers. Previously, most water quality monitoring in rivers and estuaries has taken place at fixed times that are spaced too far apart to capture storms when they occur. This is the first project in the UK to intensively monitor water quality in estuaries using sensors and weather prediction technology to anticipate a storm. The Project PI is Duncan Purdie (Ocean and Earth Sciences, NOC).

Multibeam swath bathymetry data were collected with a hull-mounted Kongsberg EM120 and EM710 echosounder during RRS James Cook cruise JC125 (Chief Scientist Veerle Huvenne) from August-September 2015. The cruise was conducted to map Whittard Canyon, a deep ocean canyon in the Bay of Biscay, in order to obtain a better insight in the biodiversity patterns, benthic habitat distributions and sediment transport processes of submarine canyons. The data were edited using Caris HIPS software by Catherine Wardell and gridded at 50 m spacing (EM120) and 10 m (EM710) in a WGS84 UTM Zone 29N projection. The vertical datum of the data is matched to mean sea level (MSL). They were exported as longitude-latitude-depth triples. Funding was provided by the European Research Council to CodeMap (Grant No 258482) and the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to MAREMAP.

Seafloor visual images were acquired during a survey within the Greater Haig Fras Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ), central Celtic Sea, in 2012. This was the first in a series of similar surveys to be conducted in this location. A camera system mounted on the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Autosub6000 was deployed during RRS Discovery cruise 377/8 (D377/8), and images were collected from four 4.7 km transect lines. Images were mosaicked in "tiles" consisting of five consecutive images (each tile representing approximately 7.3 m2 of seabed). Images were orthorectified and scaled to a common altitude per tile. The mosaicked tiles are provided in this collection. The aim of the survey was to undertake high-resolution acoustic seabed mapping and visual imagery in a Marine Protected Area, in order to highlight the capability of AUV technology for offshore seabed mapping and benthic assemblage assessment. The work was initially undertaken as part of a Defra-funded project "Investigating the feasibility of utilizing AUV and Glider technology for mapping and monitoring of the UK MPA network (MB0118)", Case study 2: Shallow-water AUV mapping off SW UK (https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/500733/), and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded Autonomous Ecological Surveying of the Abyss project (NE/H021787/1), involving scientists from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), UK.

This dataset consists of measurements of species type, count and size of mollusc species of the coral reefs in the Philippines. Sampling was conducted over four locations in the Philippine archipelago from 23 March 2012 to 19 June 2012. Data were collected through a field survey conducted by snorkelling and diving along a series of replicate transects from the shallow nearshore reef flat to a depth of 15m on the outer reef slope. The molluscs were counted, identified to species and measured (to gauge population structure and reproductive status). These surveys formed the field component of NERC Discovery Science project "Effects of coral reef habitat degradation and overexploitation on gastropod molluscs at the global centre of marine biodiversity". The project aimed to: Determine whether deteriorating quality of habitats in coral reef ecosystems, resulting from anthropogenic and other impacts, coupled with intensive artisanal fishing pressure, leads to a decline in gastropod mollusc abundance and species richness; Establish the trajectory of species loss in relation to these pressures by contrasting reefs within regions that have been degraded and/or exploited to differing extents. NERC Research Grant NE/I015566/1 funded the project. The grant is held by the University of York, Department of Environment and led by Dr Julie Patricia Hawkins. It ran from 01 September 2011 to 31 August 2012. Mollusc size and count data have been received by BODC as raw files and will be processed and quality controlled using in-house BODC procedures before being made available online in the future. Raw files are available on request from BODC Enquiries.

This dataset provides yearly estimates of near-global (65N-65S) ocean heat content and thermosteric sea-level depth-integrated for the upper 700 meters of the ocean for 1970 - 2023. The yearly values are presented with three-year smoothing and one-sigma error estimates. The dataset builds upon and updates the methodology established in Domingues et al. (2008, Nature), incorporating temperature measurements from ocean observation systems and applying corrections for instrumental biases and sampling irregularities. To estimate ocean heat content for the upper 700 m and the associated thermosteric sea level, we used ocean temperature profiles from the ENACT/ENSEMBLES version 3 (EN3) data set (1970-2004), and Argo/Ifremer profiling floats (2000-2023, updated January 2024). Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOFs) were used to model variability of the time-varying sea level and were calculated from 23 years (1993–2015) of satellite altimeter data sourced from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), (TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2 and Jason-3).