Hundreds of NDBC Stations Now Available

This week we’ve added marine observational data from over 800 stations collected by NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) to Planet OS Datahub. In addition to the new datasets, we’ve also launched a new API endpoint for making station based queries.

NEW DATASETS

NDBC Standard Meteorological Data
This dataset includes temperature, wind, wave, sea level pressure, dewpoint, station visibility, and tidal data from over 800 individual stations. Stations typically report on an hourly basis, however some stations may report more frequently.

NDBC MMS Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler Data
This dataset contains water current velocity and direction for 35 stations located in coastal U.S. waters and lakes. Some stations provide only surface current data, while others provide current data at multiple depths.

NDBC Continuous Winds Data
Continuous wind measurements are six 10-minute average values of wind speed and direction reported each hour. These measurements provide wind data for users who need better temporal resolution, such as for micro-scale studies of air quality and sea breeze effects.

NDBC Spectral Wave Density Data With Direction
Spectral wave data is generated by processing raw accelerometer observations on board the station. The output includes the separation frequency, the spectral wave density, the spectral wave direction, and the directional wave spectrum.

STATION API ENDPOINT

To facilitate querying datasets that contain one or more stations, such as the NDBC datasets above, we’ve released a new station API endpoint. We’ve also published a Jupyter notebook on GitHub that compares WaveWatch III forecast data to observed conditions.

Originally published at planetos.com on July 22, 2016.