Historical North Atlantic Ocean Temperature Profiles from OTTERSTETTER

From February 1957 to May 1958, this dataset contains mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) temperature-depth profiles collected by the vessel OTTERSTETTER in the North Atlantic Ocean. It was processed by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) into the standard C128 format, recording temperature at uniform 5-meter depth intervals up to approximately 285 meters. The data provides a snapshot of the thermal structure of the ocean's upper layers during this period.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the seasonal thermal structure of the upper North Atlantic Ocean using temperature-depth pairs.
• Studying historical ocean conditions by cross-referencing cruise information, date, position, and time for each profile.
• Calibrating or validating ocean models for the 1957-1958 period with in-situ temperature observations.
• Investigating mixed-layer depth variability using the high-resolution (5m interval) temperature profiles.

Strengths

• Data is processed to a known standard format (NODC C128), ensuring consistency.
• Provides high vertical resolution temperature data recorded at uniform 5-meter intervals.
• Covers a specific 15-month time period (1957-02-22 to 1958-05-31) for temporal analysis.

Limitations

• Instrument depth limit of ~285m restricts analysis to the upper ocean layers only.
• Key metadata such as row count, column names, and license are unknown across all sources.
• Data freshness is unclear; the most recent platform update date conflicts with the dataset's age.

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

Collection Method

Collected via mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) instrument and processed by NODC.

Time Range

1957-02-22 to 1958-05-31

Freshness

2026-03-05 23:37:35.427305

Geography

North Atlantic Ocean.