North Pacific Upper Ocean Temperature Profiles from C. BERRY Cruise

North Pacific Ocean temperature-depth profiles collected from the vessel C. BERRY using a Mechanical Bathythermograph (MBT) between December 17 and 21, 1965. The dataset, processed by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) into standard C128 format, contains pairs of temperature and depth values recorded at uniform 5-meter intervals. These observations are limited to the upper ocean layers, with a maximum depth of approximately 285 meters.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the vertical temperature structure of the upper ocean during a specific winter period.
• Calibrating or validating ocean mixed-layer models using historical in-situ data.
• Studying short-term thermal variability over a five-day cruise track in the North Pacific.
• Investigating instrument characteristics and data standards of historical NODC MBT (C128) records.

Strengths

• Data is processed to a documented standard format (NODC C128), ensuring consistency.
• Provides precise temporal (5-day) and spatial (North Pacific Ocean) context for each observation.
• Temperature values are recorded at uniform 5-meter depth intervals, facilitating profile analysis.

Limitations

• Key structural metadata like row count, column names, and file size are unknown.
• MBT instrument limits observations to a maximum depth of ~285m, restricting analysis to the upper ocean.
• Conflicting 'last updated' dates exist between platforms (2026-03-05 on Data.gov vs. 1965-12-21 on NASA Earthdata).

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), originally from NODC.

Collection Method

Collected via Mechanical Bathythermograph (MBT) instrument during a research cruise.

Time Range

1965-12 17 to 1965-12-21

Freshness

2026-03-05 23:58:00.070544

Geography

North Pacific Ocean