National Data Buoy Center
Tim Rulon
National Weather Service
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3-meter Buoy |
Arguably, a buoy is just a speck on the great big sea. However, thousands of mariners access their observations each month, along with the forecasts,to help them make critical safety decisions. With this in mind, we've created several new ways to obtain the latest observations.
Vessels that have can send an e-mail, but have no World Wide Web capability, can e-mail a series of commands to obtain a single observation. This capability, called FTPmail, is the same one used to obtain NWS marine forecasts.
What's new is that NDBC has created small files that contain just the latest information for each station.
Here's the commands that you would use to obtain the observations from buoy station 41001:
open www.ndbc.noaa.gov
cd /data/latest_obs
get 41001.txt
quit
For more information on how to use FTPmail and the other NWS marine products that are available, see http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/fax/ftpmail.txt.
Closer to shore, mariners that have Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's) can obtain the same information via the wireless web. The URL to obtain this is: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/mini_station_page.phtml
Type the station identifier in the box followed by enter to see the latest observation.
Again, these are small, text-only files, with limited line length.
Finally, NDBC's voice response system, Dial-A-Buoy, now reads all moored buoys and coastal stations shown on NDBC's web site, http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov.
This includes Canadian and European buoys as well as university-maintained buoys or stations.
If you haven't been to NDBC's web site in several years, check again. The number and coverage of buoys is increasing.
Instructions on how to use Dial-A-Buoy are located at http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/dial.shtml.
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