Historical Bathythermograph Data from USS James E. Kyes Across the Pacific

Bathythermograph (MBT) data collected by the USS James E. Kyes vessel across multiple ocean basins from 1948 to 1961. The dataset contains temperature-depth profile pairs recorded at uniform 5-meter intervals down to a maximum depth of approximately 285 meters. Data was processed by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) into the standard C128 format.

Use Cases

• Analyzing upper ocean thermal structure using temperature-depth value pairs.
• Studying historical ocean temperature variability across the East China Sea, South Pacific Ocean, and other regions.
• Correlating cruise information, date, position, and time with observed temperature profiles.
• Investigating pre-1960s ocean conditions in the Pacific and Indian Ocean basins.

Strengths

• Covers a long temporal range of over 12 years (1948-1961).
• Provides standardized data processed to the NODC C128 format.
• Includes specific geographic coverage across eight distinct ocean regions.

Limitations

• Conflicting metadata: row count, column names, and exact size are unknown across all sources.
• Instrument limitation: MBT data is only useful for studying the upper ocean layers to ~285m depth.
• Data freshness is low, with the last observation date in 1961, despite a 2026 metadata update.

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

Collection Method

Collected via mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) instrument on the USS James E. Kyes and processed by NODC.

Time Range

1948-09-02 to 1961-03-23

Freshness

Most recent metadata update was 2026-03-05, but the underlying data collection ended in 1961.

Geography

East China Sea, Great Australian Bight, Indian Ocean, Japan Sea, North Pacific Ocean, Philippine Sea, South China Sea, South Pacific Ocean.