Radiolarians (holoplanktonic Protozoa) found in marine sediments are commonly used in Southern Ocean as palaeoclimate proxies. Generating such reconstructions of past climate based on radiolarian abundances requires a spatially and environmentally comprehensive reference dataset of modern radiolarian census counts. The Southern Ocean RADiolarian (SO-RAD) dataset includes census counts for 237 radiolarian taxa from 228 surface sediment samples located in the Atlantic, Indian and South-west Pacific sectors of the Southern Ocean. This compilation is the largest radiolarian census dataset derived from surface sediment samples in the Southern Ocean. The SO-RAD dataset may be used as a reference dataset for palaeoceanographic reconstructions, or for studying modern radiolarian biogeography and species diversity. RELATED PUBLICATION: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-5441-2021

Diatom census counts were used to quantitatively estimate summer sea-surface temperatures (SST) over the last 40,000 years in core MD11-3353, collected in 2011 on board the R.V. Marion Dusfresne west of Kerguelen Island, Southern Ocean. The transfer function used to reconstruct summer (January to March) SST is the Modern Analog Technique that here uses 249 surface sediment samples (modern analogs), the relative abundances of 32 diatom species and the chord distance to select the five most similar modern analogs (Crosta et al., 2020). This method yields a root mean square error of prediction of ~1 °C. The core chronology is detailed in Thöle et al. (2019). RELATED PUBLICATION: Civel-Mazens, Matthieu; Crosta, Xavier; Cortese, Giuseppe; Michel, Elisabeth; Mazaud, Alain; Ther, Olivier; Ikehara, Minoru; Itaki, Takuya (2021): Impact of the Agulhas Return Current on the oceanography of the Kerguelen Plateau region, Southern Ocean, over the last 40 kyrs. Quaternary Science Reviews, 251, 106711, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106711