Historical Ocean Temperature Profiles from HMS Mounts Bay

Bathythermograph data records temperature-depth profiles from the HMS Mounts Bay across seven ocean basins, including the East China Sea and North Atlantic. The dataset contains observations from February 1957 to August 1959, processed into the NODC standard C128 format. It was collected by the ship and processed by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC).

Use Cases

• Analyzing the thermal structure of the upper ocean (up to ~285m) using temperature-depth value pairs.
• Studying spatial variability of sea surface temperatures across the East China Sea, Indian Ocean, and North Atlantic.
• Investigating seasonal or interannual temperature changes from 1957 to 1959 using date and time columns.
• Correlating cruise information and position data with regional oceanographic conditions.

Strengths

• Provides a defined temporal range covering over two years of observations (1957-02 08 to 1959-08-11).
• Data is standardized to a known format (NODC C128), ensuring consistent structure with temperature recorded at uniform 5m intervals.
• Covers a wide geographical scope across seven major ocean basins, indicating broad spatial sampling.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable from all sources.
• The maximum observation depth is limited to approximately 285 meters, restricting analysis to the ocean's upper layers.
• The last updated date conflicts between platforms (2026-03-06 on Data.gov vs. 1959-08-11 on NASA Earthdata).

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), from HMS Mounts Bay.

Collection Method

Collected using Mechanical Bathythermograph (MBT) instruments and processed by NODC to the C128 format.

Time Range

1957-02-08 to 1959-08-11

Freshness

2026-03-06 00:13:05.298309

Geography

East China Sea, Indian Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, North Pacific Ocean, Philippine Sea, South Atlantic Ocean, South China Sea.