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The growing interest in climate and climatic change has renewed the demand for climate descriptions of the world oceans. Fields of climate variables are used as boundary conditions, or sea truth, for atmospheric and oceanic models and coupled models of the atmosphere-ocean system. The rapid improvements that modeling has made in recent years also call for more detailed descriptions of processes at the air-sea interface. The climate atlas presented here is restricted to the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic is of special interest for two reasons: The cross-equatorial ocean heat transport is an outstanding climatic feature which contributes to the high sea-surface temperatures in the Northeastern North Atlantic and the mild climate of Europe. From a more technical point of view, the data coverage of the Atlantic is much denser than for other parts of the world oceans. Hence, the Atlantic can well serve as a reliable test area of sea truth for both modeling and satellite remote sensing.
