World Ocean World Ocean The World Ocean or Global Ocean (colloquially the sea or the ocean) is the interconnected system of Earth's oceanic waters, and comprises the bulk of the hydrosphere, covering (70.8%) of Earth's surface, with a total volume of roughly . The unity and continuity of the World Ocean, with relatively free interchange among its parts, is of fundamental importance to oceanography. It is divided into a number of principal oceanic areas that are delimited by the continents and various oceanographic features: these divisions are the Atlantic Ocean, Arctic Ocean (sometimes considered a sea of the Atlantic), Indian Ocean, Pacific
World Ocean Atlas World Ocean Atlas The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) is a data product of the Ocean Climate Laboratory of the National Oceanographic Data Center (U.S.). The WOA consists of a climatology of fields of "in situ" ocean properties for the World Ocean. It was first produced in 1994 (based on the earlier "Climatological Atlas of the World Ocean"), with later editions at roughly four year intervals in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, and 2013. The fields that make up the WOA dataset consist of objectively-analysed global grids at 1° spatial resolution. The fields are three-dimensional, and data are typically interpolated onto 33