A Treasure Trove of Buoy Data
Every day, the National Weather Service issues countless official forecasts and warnings, relying on a large network of land and ocean sensors to provide up-to-the-minute observations of the weather around the world. The accuracy of these forecasts depends largely on having enough data collected from the right places, all transmitted back to the forecaster in a timely manner. While it’s relatively easy to set up an instrument station on land and communicate with it, it’s far more difficult to do so in the ocean.
To meet this need, NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center is tasked with operating and maintaining a global network of over 250 buoys and shore stations that collect and relay (via satellite) real-time data on atmospheric and ocean conditions. As if that wasn’t enough, NDBC also collects and processes data from over 850 additional stations run by a number of collaborators, including the National Ocean Service, the Integrated Ocean Observing System and even the oil and gas industry.
Most importantly, NDBC provides their data to the world to use, for free. Their site may not be pretty, but it is an amazing resource for atmospheric and ocean data, (they even include a lot of background information) and it is an essential resource for oceanographers who need weather data to provide context to their experiments.
From the NDBC homepage, you can quickly navigate to any region of the world that you might be interested in. Clicking on any buoy or land station brings up the most recent real-time observations from that station, as well as links to additional information on the station (including 5-day graphs of each variable), and a full archive of data. The archived data files are relatively easy to use (though they do take some massaging – more on that soon), and they provide a virtual treasure trove of information to explore.
As someone who is interested in data about the natural world, and in particular about the ocean, I often find myself on the NDBC site. Whether you want to investigate physical processes like the correlation between winds and waves or between air and water temperatures, or study the differences and similarities between two locations, or review the events that occurred during past storms, the wealth of data on the buoy center’s site is sure to keep you busy for a long time.
If you have a favorite research subject or activity that you utilize NDBC data for, I’d love to hear about it. Please leave a note in the comments, or contact me.
