NODC Data Search

Are you looking for data from a particular region, dates, and/or time of year? From a particular country or ship? Which has observations for a specific property or with high-precision temperature and/or salinity observations? From stations which sample to at least a specified depth?

While the ocean sections available from our electronic library of data may meet your needs, sometimes they do not. There is a terrific on-line data search and retrieval vehicle, "Hydrosearch - Hydrographic data search", available at http://nemo.ucsd.edu/hs.html. The group which maintains this site has provided extensive nested search capabilities for a copy of the US National Oceanographic Data Center ocean profile data holdings as of 1991. Search capabilities include any or all of the questions noted above. Output can be a list of stations, or can be all the data, either on screen or saved to a file for retrieval. The output format is NODC SD2, which means that the saved data from a Hydrosearch session can be read directly into Java OceanAtlas.

Note: There are many data and format errors in the NODC SD2 holdings. Sometimes Java OceanAtlas will refuse to read a file saved from a Hydrosearch session. In those cases open the file in a text editor and first make certain the beginning and the end of the file meet JOA specifications for SD2 files. Next, if that is no help, try splitting the file into pieces (with breaks at the text file's divisions between profiles, of course). Often a troublesome profile or two will be removed this way and the remaining profiles can be imported successfully into Java OceanAtlas.