Bathythermograph Data from Bay of Bengal Cruise

NOAA_NCEI provides mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) data collected from the R/V RANA PRATAP in the Bay of Bengal on October 21, 1952. The dataset contains temperature-depth profile pairs recorded at uniform 5-meter intervals down to a maximum depth of approximately 285 meters. It has been processed and formatted to the NODC standard C128 format for bathythermograph observations.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the vertical thermal structure of the upper ocean using temperature-depth pairs.
• Studying historical sea surface temperature conditions in the Bay of Bengal region.
• Validating or calibrating ocean model outputs for specific geographic positions and times.
• Investigating short-term oceanic heat content variability from single-station profiles.

Strengths

• Data is processed to a recognized standard format (NODC C128), ensuring consistency.
• Provides precise geospatial and temporal context with cruise information, date, position, and time for each observation.
• The uniform 5-meter sampling interval allows for straightforward analysis of thermal gradients.

Limitations

• The dataset is limited to a single day of observations (1952-10-21), offering no temporal range for trend analysis.
• Key metadata such as exact row count, column names, and license information are unavailable across all platforms.
• The MBT instrument's maximum depth of ~285m restricts analysis to the upper ocean layers only.

Provenance

Source

NOAA_NCEI

Collection Method

Collected via mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) instrument from R/V RANA PRATAP and processed by NODC.

Time Range

1952-10-21 to 1952-10-21

Freshness

2026-03-05 23:18:11.083520

Geography

Bay of Bengal