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Full catalog/OCEAN CLIMATE STATIONS
OCEAN CLIMATE STATIONS·dataset

Long-term ocean weather buoys, Pacific (NOAA)

NOAA/PMEL Ocean Climate Stations Moorings
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Continuous measurements from two anchored ocean buoys, recording air temperature, humidity, sunlight, pressure, winds, and rain at the surface, plus water temperature, saltiness, and currents below.

How it's made. NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory operates moored buoys (KEO near Japan and Papa in the Gulf of Alaska), calibrating and stitching deployments into continuous records.

How & where you'd use it. These reference-quality time series help scientists study how the ocean and atmosphere exchange heat and moisture, and track climate change at sea.

What's measured

aws-pdsclimateenvironmentaloceansweather

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

The mission of the Ocean Climate Stations (OCS) Project is to make meteorological and oceanic measurements from autonomous platforms. Calibrated, quality-controlled, and well-documented climatological measurements are available on the OCS webpage and the OceanSITES Global Data Assembly Centers (GDACs), with near-realtime data available prior to release of the complete, downloaded datasets. OCS measurements served through the Big Data Program come from OCS high-latitude moored buoys located in the Kuroshio Extension (32°N 145°E) and the Gulf of Alaska (50°N 145°W). Initiated in 2004 and 2007, the respective moored buoys, KEO and Papa, measure a suite of surface and subsurface essential ocean variables. The surface suite includes air temperature, relative humidity, shortwave and longwave radiation, barometric pressure, winds, and rain, while subsurface instrumentation includes temperature, salinity, and ocean currents. Individual buoy deployments are stitched together into a continuous time-series, which is synced to the OceanSITES GDACs, and subsequently, to BDP.

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).