XBT Data: Historical Water Temperature Profiles from Navy Cruises

From May 1971 to October 1991, water temperature at varying depths was recorded via expendable bathythermograph (XBT) during forty US Navy cruises. The original analog stripchart data has been digitized and is stored in the NODC C116 file format. This dataset provides a twenty-year record of subsurface ocean temperatures primarily from the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal.

Use Cases

• Analyzing decadal trends in subsurface ocean temperature based on a twenty-year time series.
• Calibrating or validating ocean model hindcasts using historical in-situ temperature profiles.
• Studying the evolution of oceanographic data collection from analog stripcharts to digital formats.

Strengths

• Covers a substantial twenty-year period from 1971 to 1991.
• Includes data from forty distinct research cruises, suggesting spatial and temporal diversity.
• Represents a digitized historical record, preserving data originally recorded on physical media.

Limitations

• Critical metadata is missing: column names, row count, file size, and license are unknown.
• Sources conflict on the 'last updated' date (1991 vs. 2026), creating uncertainty about data currency.
• Documentation is sparse, with no details on data processing or potential quality flags.

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), originally from US Navy cruises submitted by Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center.

Collection Method

Real-time XBT data recorded on stripcharts, later digitized.

Time Range

1971-05-06 to 1991-10-28

Freshness

2026-03-06 00:11:59.578543

Geography

Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, and other unspecified regions.