Philippine Sea Temperature Profiles from 1964 O'Brien Cruise

285 temperature-depth profile pairs were collected by the O'Brien vessel in the Philippine Sea during April 1964. The data was processed by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) into the standard C128 format for Mechanical Bathythermograph (MBT) observations. It captures the thermal structure of the ocean's upper layers to a maximum depth of approximately 285 meters.

Use Cases

• Analyzing vertical temperature gradients in the upper ocean using paired temperature-depth values.
• Studying historical ocean thermal conditions in the Philippine Sea region during April 1964.
• Validating or calibrating ocean model outputs for the upper 285 meters of the water column.
• Investigating diurnal or short-term thermal variability using cruise date, position, and time metadata.

Strengths

• Data is standardized to the NODC C128 format, ensuring consistent structure and units.
• Provides precise temporal and spatial context with cruise information, date, position, and time for each observation.
• Temperature measurements are recorded at uniform 5-meter depth intervals, facilitating systematic analysis.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as exact row count, column names, and license information are unavailable from all sources.
• The MBT instrument's maximum depth of ~285m limits analysis to the ocean's upper layers only.
• The dataset's temporal scope is restricted to a single 25-day cruise in April 1964.

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), originally from the O'Brien cruise.

Collection Method

Collected via Mechanical Bathythermograph (MBT) instrument and processed by NODC.

Time Range

1964-04-01 to 1964-04-25

Freshness

2026-04-01 15:12:29.505570

Geography

Philippine Sea