USS Requisite Upper Ocean Temperature Profiles 1954-1962

Mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) data collected by the USS Requisite provides temperature-depth profiles for the upper 285 meters of the ocean. The dataset covers a wide geographic range including the Mediterranean Sea, North Atlantic, North Pacific, and several marginal seas over an eight-year period from 1954 to 1962. Data has been processed and standardized by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) into the C128 format.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the thermal structure of the upper ocean layer using paired temperature-depth values recorded at 5-meter intervals.
• Studying spatial and temporal variability of sea surface temperatures and subsurface thermal gradients across 12 distinct marine regions.
• Reconstructing historical ocean conditions for climate model validation using cruise information, date, position, and time metadata.
• Investigating naval survey methodologies and historical data collection techniques from the mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) era.

Strengths

• Covers a significant eight-year time span (1954-1962) across 12 geographically diverse marine regions.
• Data is standardized to the NODC C128 format, ensuring consistent structure with uniform 5-meter depth intervals.
• Each observation includes detailed metadata: cruise information, date, precise position, and time.

Limitations

• Instrument limitation restricts observations to a maximum depth of approximately 285 meters, capturing only the upper ocean thermal structure.
• Platform sources provide no information on the total row count, column names, or dataset size.
• Conflicting metadata exists: one datagov source lists 'oceanography' as a tag while another lists none, and NASA Earthdata provides no descriptive information.

Provenance

Source

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), originally from USS Requisite surveys.

Collection Method

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

Time Range

1954-01-01 to 1962-04-03

Freshness

2026-03-05 23:59:12.493842

Geography

Alboran Sea, Arabian Sea, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, Gulf of Suez, Mediterranean Sea, North Atlantic Ocean, North Pacific Ocean, Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Red Sea.