Best Oceanographic Datasets, Databases & APIs

What is Oceanographic Data?

Oceanography is a scientific discipline that studies a wide range of topics that comprise marine life and ecosystems, plate tectonics and theory, the geology of the seafloor, and the chemical and physical composition of the ocean floor bed. Therefore, from this wide-ranging topic of oceanography, data is collected to describe and highlight the physical characteristics of the ocean and atmosphere boundary strata and the subsurface placement of seawater features.

How is Oceanographic Data collected?

Oceanographers collect ocean data with the aid of both manual methods and by the use of remote sensing devices. Remote sensing methods such as satellites, special buoys, and ship radiometers are used by oceanographers to remotely sample the ocean surface and scientific aircraft. The methods of manual collection involve the recovery of traps, weighing the contained materials in them, and finally using chemical analysis to achieve conclusive results. Field observations, field experiments, and computer models are also handy in providing some crucial information relating to oceanography.

What are the typical attributes of Oceanographic Data?

Ocean data is complex, huge, and evaluates the advanced processes of the active interaction between multi-scaled ocean features that include tides, currents, waves, seabed topography, surface wind, and other atmospheric factors. These ocean data elements are made up of marine environmental elements. These elements include oceanographic hydrological data and marine meteorological data. Oceanographic hydrological data consists of water depth, water temperature, salinity, current, wave, watercolor, transparency, sea ice, and sea light features. On the other hand, meteorological data contains attributes that include temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, precipitation, cloud, fog data, and other environmental-based factors. In a nutshell, ocean data is characterized by multiple ocean data properties such as high heterogeneity and dimension, huge volume, extended spatiotemporal variability, and the interaction of various ocean features.

What is Oceanographic Data used for?

Ocean analysis leads to findings that reduce unknowns in deep-ocean areas, thus offering the means to access high-value ocean environment intelligence data. Collection and evaluation of this data is an important undertaking that helps users to address both current and projected science and management need as far as ocean information is concerned. Information drawn from the ocean is important to everyone through the unlocking the mysteries of deep-sea ecosystems and can be used in several ways:

• Marine environment monitoring
• Marine scientific research
• Hydrographic surveys
• Military surveys and data gathering
• Exploration and commercial research.
 

How can a user assess the quality of Oceanographic Data?

The validation of the quality of ocean data entails the assessment of the oceanographic validity of the data, in conjunction with the incorporation of the outcomes of instrumentation checks, and the acknowledged deployment parameters, and the outcomes of the quality control tests. The oceanographic validity of the data is evaluated manually by scrutinizing the data set for projected patterns or trends. The user can also assess the validity by carrying out a comparison of the core features of the data with another data set that covers the same area. Advanced methods of ocean data quality assessment involve the use of analytical methods such as harmonic analysis.

Where can I buy Oceanographic Data?

Data providers and vendors listed on Datarade sell Oceanographic Data products and samples. Popular Oceanographic Data products and datasets available on our platform are CustomWeather - Global Historical Marine Data and Analytics - 10 Years by CustomWeather, Ambee: Water Vapour Data API - Global Coverage by Ambee, and Storm Glass Tide API - Global Coverage - Forecasts & Historical Data by Storm Glass.

How can I get Oceanographic Data?

You can get Oceanographic Data via a range of delivery methods - the right one for you depends on your use case. For example, historical Oceanographic Data is usually available to download in bulk and delivered using an S3 bucket. On the other hand, if your use case is time-critical, you can buy real-time Oceanographic Data APIs, feeds and streams to download the most up-to-date intelligence.