Microproduct data guidebeginner

NOAA NDBC Buoy Observations

Real-time marine weather and wave observations from moored buoys for building coastal condition monitors and marine-operations alerts.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Tiny · ≤0.02 GB
Formats
Text, CSV
Access
Download or API
API key
Not required
Provider
NOAA National Data Buoy Center
Updates
Near real time
Data terms
U.S. Government public data / NOAA disclaimer

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

NDBC publishes a station-page text file of recent meteorological and wave observations for each buoy. Start with one station identifier such as 41001. Sensors drop out, quality flags matter, and a single buoy is not a coastal forecast.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An NDBC station identifier
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the NDBC station map and copy one buoy identifier.
  2. 2.Retrieve that station's realtime text file.
  3. 3.Keep observation time, wind speed, wave height, and air temperature.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas

import pandas as pd

observations = pd.read_csv(
    "https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/realtime2/41001.txt",
    sep=r"\s+",
    skiprows=[1],
    na_values=["MM"],
)
observations["observed_at_utc"] = pd.to_datetime(
    observations[["#YY", "MM", "DD", "hh", "mm"]].rename(
        columns={"#YY": "year", "MM": "month", "DD": "day", "hh": "hour", "mm": "minute"}
    ),
    utc=True,
)
print(observations[["observed_at_utc", "WSPD", "WVHT", "ATMP"]].head())
4

Test a useful signal

Monitor one Atlantic buoy

Test whether a single station file can power a bounded wind-and-wave condition board.

  1. 01Convert the timestamp columns to UTC and drop rows missing wind speed or wave height.
  2. 02Plot the latest hours of wind speed and significant wave height.
  3. 03Explain that one buoy cannot substitute for a coastal forecast and that MM placeholders mark missing sensors.

Dataset details

NOAA National Data Buoy Center is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: station-specific realtime and historical observations.

Theme

Environment & Hazards

Domains

WeatherMarine OperationsCoastal Data

Data types

Time SeriesSensor Observations

Tasks

Operational MonitoringAlertingMarine Planning

Geography

United States

Formats

TextCSV

Provider

NOAA National Data Buoy Center

Data terms

U.S. Government public data / NOAA disclaimer