Quality of archived NDBC data as climate records

The National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) traces its beginning to the formation of the National Data Buoy Development Program in 1967, which consolidated approximately 50 individual programs conducted by a variety of ocean-oriented agencies. Today, NDBC operates three major buoy networks. First, the traditional weather fleet consists of over 100 moored buoys covering the coastal waters of the United States, including the Great Lakes, Hawaii and Alaska. Second, the Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration´s DART^reg) Program operates 39 stations that detect and instantly report anomalies in ocean pressure associated with potential tsunami-generating seismic activity. Third, the Tropical-Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array of climate monitoring platforms covers a wide swath of the equatorial Pacific. In this paper, we assess the traditional weather fleet as a resource for climate monitoring, and we do so in two ways. Both involve scrutinizing weather fleet records exceeding 20 years duration. We assess these according to the ten climate monitoring principles recommended by the U.S. National Research Council. We observe that NDBC has implicitly considered most, if not all, of these principles in the design, maintenance, improvement and expansion of the NDBC moored buoy fleet. Focusing on two stations in the Pacific Ocean, 46035 and 46042, we demonstrate NDBC´s adherence to sound network management, careful archiving and description of metadata, steady development of comprehensive automated quality control procedures, giving users ease in data access, addressing issues of complementary data, historical significance and continuity of purpose. One area requiring strengthening remains a need for NDBC to build into its systems long-term climate requirements. Next, we propose a new method for reflecting climatic change over the oceans. The wave energy spectrum, which all NDBC weather buoys routinely report hourly, c- ontain a significant amount of information regarding the origin, intensity and duration of ocean storms. Such measurements are produced from simple accelerometers coming from a mature, stable technology. We show that records of spectral energy density at low frequencies - for wave periods exceeding 20 seconds - suggest climate change signals. This is demonstrated with data collected from station 46042 in Monterey Bay, California. Both assessments clearly indicate that the NDBC network of weather monitoring buoys are a valuable national resource for climatologists, meteorologists and oceanographers interested in marine surface fluctuations on decadal and longer durations. We note areas where small improvements in calibration techniques will likely yield large gains in confident assessment of climate change.