World Ocean Database (WOD)

The World Ocean Database (WOD) is the world’s largest collection of quality-controlled in situ ocean profile data, maintained by NOAA NCEI. It aggregates billions of measurements from bottles, CTDs, XBTs and MBTs, profiling floats, drifters, gliders, and moored buoys, spanning the late 1700s to the present, all reduced to a common format with documented quality flags and standardized metadata. The WOD is the input behind the World Ocean Atlas climatologies and a primary basis for global ocean heat-content and salinity-change time series. Its uniform corrections, such as XBT fall-rate and bias adjustments, make multi-decadal records comparable across instrument types.