NetCDF version of the NODC World Ocean Atlas 2005 (Climate and Forecasting Metadata conventions conforming) to supply the CSIRO and broader scientific community with a machine transparent, portable and self-describing version of the World Ocean Atlas 2005 (National Oceanographic Data Centre, 2006; Locarnini et al., 2006; Antonov et al., 2006; Garcia et al.,2006a,b) dataset. This Atlas is referred to by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC - http://www.nodc.noaa.gov) with the identifier WOA05. NODC offers the WOA05 in ASCII text format that is highly portable but not generally compact, self-describing or very efficient for processing and visualising. The ASCII or netCDF version of the WOA05 can be used to initialise numerical models, verify numerical model solutions, or for general oceanographic and meteorological analysis and can be imported into most plotting and analysis tools, or numerical models, that can read netCDF files. Contains temporal and spatial representation of in-situ temperature, salinity, oxygen and dissolved inorganic nutrients at 1 X 1 deg resolution with standard levels for the analysed fields of 0, 10, 20, 30, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 200, 250, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500, 1750, 2000, 2500, 3000, 3500, 4000, 4500, 5000 and 5500 metres.