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Full catalog/S102
S102·dataset

Standardized seafloor depth charts, US waters (NOAA)

NOAA S-102 Bathymetric Surface Data
ocean NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Detailed maps of water depth and seafloor shape for U.S. coastal waters, offshore areas, and the Great Lakes.

How it's made. NOAA packages its best-available bathymetry into the international S-102 standard format (HDF5 files) for hydrographic data exchange.

How & where you'd use it. These standardized depth surfaces feed modern electronic navigation systems so ships always know how much water is beneath them.

What's measured

aws-pdsbathymetrymarine navigationhydrographyoceansseafloorwater

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

S-102 is a data and metadata encoding specification that is part of the S-100 Universal Hydrographic Data Model, an international standard for hydrographic data exchange. This collection of data contains bathymetric surfaces from NOAA/NOS/OCS National Bathymetric Source, for various U.S. coastal and offshore waters and the great lakes. These datasets are encoded as HDF5 files conforming to the S-102 specification.

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).