Saildrone Baja: 60-Day Coastal Ocean and Atmospheric Measurements

A single wind-powered saildrone autonomously collected a 60-day multivariate dataset during a cruise from San Francisco to Guadalupe Island. The dataset provides high-resolution, near real-time surface observations at 1-minute intervals and current profiles to 100m depth at 5-minute resolution. Its scientific objectives targeted upwelling dynamics, air-sea interactions, and validating satellite data and ocean models.

Use Cases

• Validating satellite-derived sea surface temperature and chlorophyll-a products using co-located, high-frequency in-situ measurements.
• Studying diurnal warming effects and thermal variability using vertically distributed hull temperature loggers.
• Analyzing coastal upwelling and frontal region dynamics with concurrent ADCP current profiles and surface meteorology.
• Assimilating near real-time, multivariate ocean-atmosphere observations into regional ocean circulation models.

Strengths

• Provides concurrent, high-resolution surface (1-minute) and subsurface current profile (5-minute, 2m vertical bins) data from a single platform.
• Dataset is CF/ACDD compliant netCDF, adhering to NOAA/NCEI specifications for interoperability.
• Campaign design included repeat surveys around NDBC buoys and targeted frontal sampling for validation and process studies.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is low: specific column names, row counts, and file sizes are not provided by any source.
• Conflicting 'last updated' dates exist between platforms (2018-06-11 vs. 2026-04-09), creating uncertainty about metadata freshness.
• Data is from a single saildrone deployment, limiting spatial coverage to its specific 60-day track.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Data collected by an instrumented, autonomous Saildrone Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV).

Time Range

11 April 2018 to 11 June 2018

Freshness

2026-04-09 22:18:08.922959 (from datagov, though this conflicts with an earlier date on nasa_earthdata)

Geography

Northeast Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco Bay along the US/Mexico coast to Guadalupe Island and back.