Abstract
The advent of under-ice profiling float and biologging techniques has
enabled year-round observation of the Southern Ocean and its Antarctic
margin. These under-ice data are often overlooked in widely used
oceanographic datasets, despite their importance in understanding the
seasonality and its role in sea ice changes, bottom water formation, and
glacial melt. We develop a four-dimensional climatology of the Southern
Ocean (south of 40°S and above 2,000 m) using Data Interpolating
Variational Analysis, which excels in multi-dimensional interpolation
and consistent handling of topography and advection. The climatology
captures thermohaline variability under sea ice, previously hard to
obtain, and outperforms other products in data fidelity with smaller
root-mean-square errors and biases. Our dataset will be instrumental for
investigating seasonality and for improving ocean models. This work
further highlights the quantitative significance of under-ice data in
reproducing ocean conditions, advocating for their increased use to
achieve a better Southern Ocean observing system.