Abstract
Ocean observational gridded products are vital for climate monitoring, ocean and climate research, model evaluation, and supporting climate mitigation and adaptation measures. This paper describes the 4th version of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAPv4) ocean temperature and ocean heat content (OHC) objective analysis product. It accounts for recent developments in quality control (QC) procedures, climatology, bias correction, vertical and horizontal interpolation, and mapping and is available for the upper 6000 m (119 levels) since 1940 (more reliable after ∼ 1957) for monthly and 1°×1° temporal and spatial resolutions. IAPv4 is compared with the previous version, IAPv3, and with the other data products, sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and satellite observations. It has a slightly stronger long-term upper 2000 m OHC increase than IAPv3 for 1955–2023, mainly because of newly developed bias corrections. The IAPv4 0–2000 m OHC trend is also higher during 2005–2023 than IAPv3, mainly because of the QC process update. The uppermost level of IAPv4 is consistent with independent SST datasets. The month-to-month OHC variability for IAPv4 is desirably less than IAPv3 and the other OHC products investigated in this study, the trend of ocean warming rate (i.e., warming acceleration) is more consistent with the net energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere than IAPv3, and the sea level budget can be closed within uncertainty. The gridded product is freely accessible at 10.12157/IOCAS.20240117.002 for temperature data (Cheng et al., 2024a) and at 10.12157/IOCAS.20240117.001 for ocean heat content data (Cheng et al., 2024b).