Detailed descriptions of microbial communities have lagged far behind physical and chemical measurements in the marine environment. Here, we present 971 globally distributed surface ocean metagenomes collected at high spatio-temporal resolution. Our low-cost metagenomic sequencing protocol produced 3.65 terabases of data, where the median number of base pairs per sample was 3.41 billion. The median distance between sampling stations was 26 km. The metagenomic libraries described here were collected as a part of a biological initiative for the Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program, or “Bio-GO-SHIP.” One of the primary aims of GO-SHIP is to produce high spatial and vertical resolution measurements of key state variables to directly quantify climate change impacts on ocean environments. By similarly collecting marine metagenomes at high spatiotemporal resolution, we expect that this dataset will help answer questions about the link between microbial communities and biogeochemical fluxes in a changing ocean.

对微生物群落的详细描述远远落后于海洋环境中的物理和化学测量。在这里，我们展示了以高时空分辨率收集的 971 个全球分布的表面海洋宏基因组。我们的低成本宏基因组测序方案产生了 3.65 TB 数据，其中每个样本的碱基对中位数为 34.1 亿个。采样站之间的中位距离为 26 公里。这里描述的宏基因组文库是作为全球海洋船舶水文调查计划（或“Bio-GO-SHIP”）生物倡议的一部分收集的。 GO-SHIP 的主要目标之一是对关键状态变量进行高空间和垂直分辨率测量，以直接量化气候变化对海洋环境的影响。通过类似地以高时空分辨率收集海洋宏基因组，我们期望该数据集将有助于回答有关不断变化的海洋中微生物群落与生物地球化学通量之间的联系的问题。