Centuries of ocean depth measurements (NOAA World Ocean Database)
What it measures. The largest tidy, quality-checked public archive of measurements taken below the ocean surface, recording things like temperature, saltiness, oxygen, and nutrients at different depths. It spans from Captain Cook's 1772 voyage to today's drifting Argo floats.
How it's made. NOAA assembles it by gathering and standardizing subsurface ocean profiles collected worldwide over centuries into one uniform, quality-controlled format.
How & where you'd use it. Scientists rely on it to track how the oceans are changing physically, chemically, and biologically over time, making it a foundation for climate research and ocean studies.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span— → ongoing
What you can do with it
- Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
- Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
- Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description
The World Ocean Database (WOD) is the largest uniformly formatted, quality-controlled, publicly available historical subsurface ocean profile database. From Captain Cook's second voyage in 1772 to today's automated Argo floats, global aggregation of ocean variable information including temperature, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, and others vs. depth allow for study and understanding of the changing physical, chemical, and to some extent biological state of the World's Oceans. Browse the bucket via the AWS S3 explorer: https://noaa-wod-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
Get the data
# 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 rioxarrayNOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).
Official links
- Open data source NOAA Open Data