The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) has three major real-time ocean observing networks: (1) Weather and Ocean Platform (WxOP) Network, (2) Tropical Atmosphere/Ocean (TAO) Buoy Network, and (3) Tsunameter Buoy Network. The WxOP Platform network includes 111 moored buoys and 49 land-based Coastal-Marine Automated Network (C-MAN) stations. NDBC's moored buoys are deployed in the coastal and offshore waters from the Western Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean around Hawai'i, and from the Bering Sea to the South Pacific (including Great Lakes). C-MAN stations are usually located near the U.S. coastal water. The TAO buoy network, designed for the study of year-to-year climate variations related to El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO), consists of 55 moored ocean surface buoys and 4 sub-surface moorings along the equatorial Pacific Ocean region extending from 9°N Latitude to 8°S Latitude and 95°W Longitude to 165°E Longitude. The Tsunameter Buoy Network consists of 39 tsunameter buoy systems in the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic. This paper describes NDBC's 250+ ocean observing platforms/systems and presents some examples of data collected by these platforms and systems.

Date Published: 20 April 2010
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 7678, Ocean Sensing and Monitoring II, 76780E (20 April 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.849778

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7678:
Ocean Sensing and Monitoring II
Weilin (Will) Hou; Robert A. Arnone, Editor(s)