The Aquarius spacecraft is designed to measure global sea surface salinity. It is important to understand salinity, the amount of dissolved salts in water, because it will lead us to better understanding of the water cycle and can lead to improved climate models. Aquarius is a collaboration between NASA and the Space Agency of Argentina
This visualization celebrates over three years of successful Aquarius observations. Sea surface salinity is shown on a flat map using simple cartesian and extended Molleide projections. Versions are included with and without grid lines, and in both Altantic-centered and Pacific-centered projections.
The range of time shown is September 2011 through September 2014. This visualization was generated based on version 3.0 of the Aquarius data products.
GCMD keywords can be found on the Internet with the following citation:
Olsen, L.M., G. Major, K. Shein, J. Scialdone, S. Ritz, T. Stevens, M. Morahan, A. Aleman, R. Vogel, S. Leicester, H. Weir, M. Meaux, S. Grebas, C.Solomon, M. Holland, T. Northcutt, R. A. Restrepo, R. Bilodeau, 2013. NASA/Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Earth Science Keywords. Version 8.0.0.0.0