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Full catalog/OCS HYDRODATA
OCS HYDRODATA·dataset

US coastal seafloor depth survey data (NOAA)

NOAA Office of Coast Survey - Hydrographic Survey Data
ocean NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Measurements of how deep the water is and the shape of the seafloor and shoreline (bathymetry and topography) along U.S. coasts and waterways.

How it's made. NOAA's Office of Coast Survey gathers hydrographic survey data from its own ships and many other providers, sorting it into qualified and unqualified sets.

How & where you'd use it. Qualified data updates nautical charts to keep ships safe; the raw surveys also feed national seafloor mapping efforts and are shared publicly.

What's measured

aws-pdsearth observationmodeloceansbathymetrymarine navigation

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

Founded in 1807, NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey is the nation’s first scientific agency and today is responsible for supporting nearly $5.4 trillion in economic activity through providing advanced marine navigation services. The Office of Coast Survey collects and qualifies hydrographic, bathymetric, and topographic data, from NOAA platforms and many other data providers. These data and associated deliverables are posted here for various users to access, including but not limited to the "National Bathymetric Source Program" for incorporation into compilations of the best available bathymetry and NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) for archival. Qualified data is cleared for application to the navigation products and for public distribution without restriction. Unqualified data is either in queue to be qualified or deemed not to be usable for navigation, but cleared for public distribution according to the data license associated with each file.

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).