This visualization celebrates over a year of successful Aquarius observations. Sea surface salinity is shown at various locations around the globe highlighting the following:

• The Atlantic Ocean is generally much more salty than the Pacific
• Low salinity waters in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific are transported westward
• High influxes of fresh water from the Amazon River basin can be clearly seen
• Low salinity waters are transported by the Labrador current to the south
• High influxes of fresh water from the Ganges River basin can be seen keeping the Eastern Indian Ocean lower salinity than the Western Indian Ocean

The range of time shown is December 2011 through December 2012. The data continuously loops through this range every 6 seconds. This visualization was generated based on version 2.0 of the Aquarius data products with all 3 scanning beams.