USS Brown Historical Ocean Temperature Profiles 1952-1957

NOAA_NCEI provides a dataset of mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) temperature-depth profiles collected by the USS BROWN. The data covers a five-year period from March 1952 to February 1957 across the East China Sea, North Pacific Ocean, Philippine Sea, and South China Sea. Observations are processed into the NODC standard C128 format, recording temperature at uniform 5-meter depth intervals down to a maximum of approximately 285 meters.

Use Cases

• Analyzing historical sea surface temperature and subsurface thermal structure using temperature-depth value pairs.
• Studying seasonal or interannual variability in the upper ocean heat content across the specified sea regions.
• Validating or calibrating ocean model hindcasts for the 1950s using precise cruise, date, position, and time metadata.
• Investigating the spatial distribution of ocean thermal layers in the East China Sea and South China Sea.

Strengths

• Data is processed to a standardized format (NODC C128), ensuring consistency across profiles.
• Provides a multi-year temporal coverage from 1952 to 1957 across four distinct sea regions.
• Each observation includes detailed metadata: cruise information, date, position, and time.

Limitations

• The MBT instrument's maximum depth of ~285m limits analysis to the upper ocean only.
• Specific row counts, column names, and dataset size are not provided by any source.
• The last update date conflicts between sources (2026-03-06 on datagov vs. 1957-02-10 on nasa_earthdata).

Provenance

Source

NOAA_NCEI (formerly NODC), from USS BROWN cruises.

Collection Method

Collected using mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) instruments and processed to NODC C128 format.

Time Range

1952-03-10 to 1957-02-10

Freshness

2026-03-06

Geography

East China Sea, North Pacific Ocean, Philippine Sea, South China Sea