Historical Bathythermograph Data from Rocky Mount Voyage

NOAA NCEI provides a dataset of mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) observations from the vessel ROCKY MOUNT, collected between September 1944 and June 1945. The data consists of temperature-depth profile pairs recorded at uniform 5-meter intervals, useful for studying the thermal structure of the upper ocean layers up to approximately 285 meters. It covers a wide area of the North Pacific Ocean, Philippine Sea, South China Sea, and South Pacific Ocean.

Use Cases

• Analyzing historical sea surface temperature and subsurface thermal structure in the Pacific theater during World War II.
• Studying the vertical temperature gradient in the upper ocean (0-285m) for a specific time period.
• Validating or supplementing climate models with in-situ temperature-depth profile data from the 1940s.
• Mapping the spatial distribution of ocean thermal conditions across the North Pacific, Philippine Sea, and South China Sea.

Strengths

• Data is processed to a standardized NODC format (C128), ensuring consistency.
• Provides detailed temporal coverage from a specific 9-month cruise from 1944-09-05 to 1945-06-17.
• Offers spatially broad coverage across multiple major ocean basins in the Pacific region.
• Temperature data is recorded at a uniform and fine vertical resolution of 5-meter depth intervals.

Limitations

• Critical metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable from all sources.
• The MBT instrument's maximum depth of ~285m limits analysis to the upper ocean layers only.
• The dataset's age (1944-1945) may limit its direct applicability to contemporary studies without complementary modern data.

Provenance

Source

NOAA_NCEI

Collection Method

Mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) instrument measurements processed by NODC to C128 format.

Time Range

1944-09-05 to 1945-06-17

Freshness

2026-03-05 23:37:40.528710

Geography

North Pacific Ocean, Philippine Sea, South China Sea, South Pacific Ocean