Thermodynamic Properties of Seawater

The new international seawater standard TEOS-10, the International Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater 2010, was endorsed by Unesco/IOC in Paris 2009. It is based on a Gibbs function for seawater, that was first developed at the IOW 20 years ago, in combination with a redefinition of salinity in g/kg, and thermodynamic potentials for ice and humid air. All formulas are expressed in the 1990 temperature scale ITS-90. Properties can be computed from source code developed by WG127, the Seawater-Ice-Air library (SIA) and the Gibbs-Seawater library (GSW). SIA directly exploits the primary standards formulated as IAPWS documents, it is more comprehensive but slower. GSW is designed for oceanographic application, the faster routines are fits to SIA data points over the range of "Neptunian" conditions. Documents, code and background papers are available from the web sites www.teos-10.org and www.iapws.org, as well as from the Special Issue "Thermophysical Properties of Seawater" of Ocean Science.

For the first time since the first international oceanographic standard of 1902, TEOS-10 provides tools for the analysis of seawater composition anomalies, such as those in the Baltic See or in the deep Pacific. Details are found in the publications listed below.

Selected material regarding TEOS-10