Historical Ocean Station and Bathythermograph Data from 1955-1966

This dataset contains physical-chemical oceanographic measurements from the English Channel, Gulf of Mexico, North Atlantic Ocean, and North Sea, collected between July 1955 and October 1966. It was gathered by researchers H. D. CROW and SALVADOR CORREIA and processed by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) into standard C100 (Ocean Station) and C128 (Mechanical Bathythermograph) formats. The data primarily consists of temperature and salinity profiles from discrete depth levels, with additional potential parameters including dissolved oxygen, nutrients, pH, and meteorological observations.

Use Cases

• Analyzing historical temperature and salinity profiles (C100 format) to establish baseline ocean conditions.
• Studying the thermal structure of the upper ocean (to ~285m) using mechanical bathythermograph (MBT/C128) temperature-depth data.
• Investigating correlations between physical parameters (temperature, salinity) and chemical ones (dissolved oxygen, phosphate, nitrate) at discrete depth levels.
• Examining auxiliary oceanographic features such as water color (Forel-Ule scale), transparency (Secchi disk depth), and computed values like density (sigma-t).
• Reconstructing cruise-based oceanographic surveys using reported metadata (ship, country, institution, position, date, time).

Strengths

• Data spans a multi-decade period from 1955 to 1966, providing a historical snapshot.
• Observations are processed to NODC standard formats (C100, C128), ensuring a consistent structure.
• Includes both directly measured data and values interpolated to standard depth levels for comparability.

Limitations

• Conflicting metadata: row count, size, license, and author are inconsistently reported or unknown across platforms.
• Mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) data is limited to the upper ~285 meters of the ocean.
• A small, unspecified portion of data originates from early electronic CTD/STD recorders but was processed to mimic Nansen cast data.

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), originally from researchers H. D. CROW and SALVADOR CORREIA.

Collection Method

Collected via ship-based oceanographic stations using multi-bottle Nansen casts, other water samplers, and some early electronic CTD/STD recorders.

Time Range

1955-07-15 to 1966-10-18

Freshness

Most recent metadata update recorded on 2026-03-06, though the underlying data collection ended in 1966.

Geography

English Channel, Gulf of Mexico, North Atlantic Ocean, North Sea