But even today’s much larger database is not sufficient
to resolve the structure of the deep ocean in enough detail.
The World Ocean Database and associatedWorld Ocean
Atlas (Ocean Climate Laboratory, 2002), the most comprehensive
data set for studying the deep ocean and available
online from many oceanographic research institutions, produces
high quality decadal mean property distributions but
cannot reveal the high degree of space and time variability
that does without doubt exist. To this day observational data
only allow occasional confirmation of the existence of turbulent
features such as isolated eddies at great depth (Armi and
Zenk, 1984; McWilliams, 1985; Elliot and Sanford, 1986;
Prater and Sanford, 1994; Tomczak and Andrews, 1997).