Arctic Ocean Fram Strait, cooling and sinking to form the deepest layer of the halocline, where it circles the Arctic Basin counter-clockwise. This is the highest volumetric inflow to the Arctic Ocean, equalling about 10 times that of the Pacific inflow, and it creates the Arctic Ocean Boundary Current. It flows slowly, at about 0.02 m/s. Atlantic Water has the same salinity as Arctic Bottom Water but is much warmer (up to 3 °C). In fact, this water mass is actually warmer than the surface water, and remains submerged only due to the role of salinity in density. When water reaches the
World Ocean Database Project released approximately every four years, 1998, 2001, and 2005. The most recent World Ocean Database series, WOD09, was released in September 2009. The WOD09 has more than 9 million temperature profiles and 3.6 million salinity profiles. The table shows a comparison of the number of stations by instrument type in WOD09 with previous NODC/WDC global ocean databases. Ocean profile, plankton data, and metadata are available in the World Ocean Database for 29 depth-dependent variables (physical and biochemical) and 11 instruments types: Ocean Station Data (OSD), Mechanical Bathythermograph (MBT), Expendable Bathythermograph (XBT), Conductivity, Temperature, Depth (CTD), Undulating Oceanographic Recorder (UOR), Profiling