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OAR HOURLY GDP·dataset

Ocean drifter buoy tracks and sea temperatures (NOAA)

NOAA - hourly position, current, and sea surface temperature from drifters
ocean NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Hourly readings from floating buoys that drift with the ocean, recording their position, the speed and direction of surface currents, and sea surface temperature, each with uncertainty estimates.

How it's made. NOAA's Global Drifter Program collects data from satellite-tracked buoys, then quality-controls and smooths it to clean hourly values.

How & where you'd use it. Oceanographers use these real-world measurements to map currents and study fast processes like tides; a 6-hourly version reaching back to 1979 suits long-term studies.

What's measured

aws-pdsclimatemeteorologicalsustainabilityweatheroceansenvironmental

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

This dataset includes *hourly* sea surface temperature and current data collected by satellite-tracked surface drifting buoys ("drifters") of the NOAA Global Drifter Program. The Drifter Data Assembly Center (DAC) at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) has applied quality control procedures and processing to edit these observational data and obtain estimates at regular hourly intervals. The data include positions (latitude and longitude), sea surface temperatures (total, diurnal, and non-diurnal components) and velocities (eastward, northward) with accompanying uncertainty estimates. Metadata include identification numbers, experiment number, start location and time, end location and time, drogue loss date, death code, manufacturer, and drifter type. Please note that data from the Global Drifter Program are also available at 6-hourly intervals but derived via alternative methods. The 6-hourly dataset goes back further in time (1979) and may be more appropriate for studies of long-term, low frequency patterns of the oceanic circulation. Yet, the 6-hourly dataset does not resolve fully high-frequency processes such as tides and inertial oscillations as well as sea surface temperature diurnal variability. [CITING NOAA - hourly position, current, and sea surface temperature from drifters data. Citation for this dataset should include the following information below.] Elipot, Shane; Sykulski, Adam; Lumpkin, Rick; Centurioni, Luca; Pazos, Mayra (2022). Hourly location, current velocity, and temperature collected from Global Drifter Program drifters

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).