The National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) distributes meteorological data from moored buoys maintained by NDBC and others. Moored buoys are the weather sentinels of the sea. They are deployed in the coastal and offshore waters from the western Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii, and from the Bering Sea to the South Pacific. NDBC's moored buoys measure and transmit barometric pressure; wind direction, speed, and gust; air and sea temperature; and wave energy spectra from which significant wave height, dominant wave period, and average wave period are derived. Even the direction of wave propagation is measured on many moored buoys. See https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/measdes.shtml for a description of the measurements.

The source data from NOAA NDBC has different column names, different units, and different missing values in different files, and other problems (notably, lots of rows with duplicate or different values for the same time point). This dataset is a standardized, reformatted, and lightly edited version of that source data, created by NOAA NMFS SWFSC ERD (email: erd.data at noaa.gov). Before 2020-01-29, this dataset only had the data that was closest to a given hour, rounded to the nearest hour. Now, this dataset has all of the data available from NDBC with the original time values. If there are multiple source rows for a given buoy for a given time, only the row with the most non-NaN data values is kept. If there is a gap in the data, a row of missing values is inserted (which causes a nice gap when the data is graphed). Also, some impossible data values are removed, but this data is not perfectly clean. This dataset is now updated every 5 minutes.

This dataset has both historical data (quality controlled, before 2023-12-01T00:00:00Z) and near real time data (less quality controlled, which may change at any time, from 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z on). cdm_data_type=TimeSeries cdm_timeseries_variables=station, longitude, latitude contributor_name=NOAA NDBC contributor_role=Source of data. Conventions=COARDS, CF-1.6, ACDD-1.3, NCCSV-1.2 Easternmost_Easting=179.001 featureType=TimeSeries geospatial_lat_max=71.758 geospatial_lat_min=-55.0 geospatial_lat_units=degrees_north geospatial_lon_max=179.001 geospatial_lon_min=-177.75 geospatial_lon_units=degrees_east geospatial_vertical_positive=down geospatial_vertical_units=m history=Around the 25th of each month, erd.data@noaa.gov downloads the latest yearly and monthly historical .txt.gz files from https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/historical/stdmet/ and generates one historical .nc file for each station. erd.data@noaa.gov also downloads all of the 45day near real time .txt files from https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/realtime2/ and generates one near real time .nc file for each station. Every 5 minutes, erd.data@noaa.gov downloads the list of latest data from all stations for the last 2 hours from https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/latest_obs/latest_obs.txt and updates the near real time .nc files. id=cwwcNDBCMet infoUrl=https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ institution=NOAA NDBC, NOAA NMFS SWFSC ERD keywords_vocabulary=GCMD Science Keywords naming_authority=gov.noaa.pfeg.coastwatch Northernmost_Northing=71.758 project=NOAA NDBC and NOAA NMFS SWFSC ERD quality=Automated QC checks with periodic manual QC source=station observation sourceUrl=https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ Southernmost_Northing=-55.0 standard_name_vocabulary=CF Standard Name Table v70 subsetVariables=station, longitude, latitude testOutOfDate=now-25minutes time_coverage_end=2025-06-29T06:10:00Z time_coverage_start=1972-10-01T00:00:00Z Westernmost_Easting=-177.75