Many developing countries of the global South have limited field experiment programs to monitor the state of their marine environment. As part of the laboratoire mixte international ECLAIRS a monitoring program was initiated in 2017 whose aim was to design and experiment low-cost strategies (field plans, instrumentation) for the monitoring of the southern Senegal coastal ocean.

Over 50 field trips, most of them from shore to the shelf break (i.e., ~ 30 to 80 km cross-shore distance) were conducted between fall 2017 and present-day. Among the collected observations are physics and biogeochemistry vertical profiles made with RBR CTD loggers equipped with up to 7 sensors (temperature, salinity, pressure, fluorescence, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, CDOM, photosynthetic available radiation) which are gathered in this dataset (.

Nautical vehicules we used mostly consisted in a 25 footer sailing boat (16 field trips), fishing canoes (23 field trips) and, more occasionally sportfishing and work boats of size < 30 feet.

Sampling was spatially concentrated along two cross-shore transects at ~ 14.5oN and 13.55N.The trial and error approach and the constraints associated with the boats we used for the program led to some spread/variability in the exact location of the observation stations. The data is also biased toward low-wind/fair weather conditions during which field trips were easier to conduct. Nevertheless, this dataset offers, to date, the most comprehensive insitu description of the southern Senegal seasonal cycle for essential variables temperature, salinity, fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen.

Metadata are provided in each netcdf file. Whenever possible up and down profiles are provided (down profile first) so that temperature-salinity misalignments affecting the determination of salinity can be identified (temperature gradients are generally one-signed so the manifestations of misalignment errors are opposite during the up and down profiles). The field DIR provides indication on whether one of the profiles, up or down, shall be preferred (e.g., use upcast when surface data is missing for the downcast; conversely use downcast when water samples were made during the upcast  ...).