The Sea Journal of the Korean Society of Oceanography ISSN:1226-2978(Print) 2671-8820(Online) 한국해양학회지 바다

The repeated shipboard measurements that have been conducted by the National Institute of Fisheries Science (NIFS) for more than a half century, provide the valuable long-term hydrographic data with high spatial-temporal resolution. However, this unprecedent dataset has been rarely used for oceanic climate sciences because of its reliability issue. In this study, temporal variability of salinity error in the NIFS data was quantified by means of extremely small variability of salinity in the deep layer of the south-western East Sea, in order to contribute to studies on long-term variability of the East Sea. The NIFS salinity errors estimated on the isothermal surfaces of 1°C have a remarkable temporal variation, such as ~0.160 g/kg in the year of 1961~1980, ~0.060 g/kg in 1981~1994, ~0.020 g/kg in 1995~2002, and ~0.010 g/kg in 2003~2014 on average, which basically represent bias error. In the recent years, even though the quality of salinity has been improved, there still remain relatively large bias errors in salinity data presumably due to failure of salinity sensor managements, especially in 2011, 2013, and 2014. On the contrary, the salinity in the year of 2012 was very accurate and stable, whose error was estimated as about 0.001 g/kg comparable to the salinity sensor accuracy. Thus, as long as developing proper data quality control procedures and sensor management systems, I expect that the NIFS shipboard hydrographic data could have good enough quality to support various studies on ocean response to climate variabilities. Additionally, a few points to improve the current NIFS shipboard measurements were suggested in the discussion section.