NOAA · National Data Buoy Center · Station discovery

NDBC_SEARCH

Find marine buoy and coastal station IDs before requesting observations.

Syntax

NDBC_SEARCH("query")

Search literal text across station IDs, names, locations, owners, station types and notes. Matching ignores case and requires every word. An empty query lists the catalogue. Prefer specific place names; state abbreviations are useful, but searches are substrings rather than geographic boundaries.

Examples

NDBC_SEARCH("Cape Elizabeth")
NDBC_SEARCH("Dauphin Island")
NDBC_SEARCH("46041")
NDBC_SEARCH("WA")

Reading the results

Each row shows a station ID, name, location, owner/type, notes, a NOAA history link and an example observation call. The catalogue includes inactive and historical stations. It does not certify sensor availability or continuous records. State names are not expanded automatically: try WA when Washington gives no match.

Next step

NDBC_META("46041")
water=NDBC("46041","WTMP",2010,2025)
EXTRACT(water,"coverage")

Search retrieves and saves only NOAA's station table. Observations are downloaded and stored only when requested.

Extract station information

stations=NDBC_SEARCH("Cape Elizabeth")
location=EXTRACT(stations,"geolocation:0")
stationId=EXTRACT(stations,"station_id:0")
latitude=EXTRACT(stations,"latitude:0")
locations=EXTRACT(stations,"geolocations")
firstLocation=EXTRACT(locations,"0")
water=NDBC(stationId,"WTMP",2000,2025)
solar=SOLAR(water,location)

Row indices are zero-based and shown in the table. Unindexed row extracts require exactly one match. Extract count and table, or row fields geolocation, station_id, name, latitude, longitude, owner, type, hull, payload, timezone, notes, location_text, history_url and station_url with :n appended. geolocations and station_ids return ordered extractable collections: EXTRACT(collection,"0"). A collection is not a single GeoLocationOperator or numeric DataList.

Coordinates are catalogue positions, not historical deployment tracks. Geolocation objects default to elevation zero and UTC; catalogue timezone codes are returned verbatim and are not assumed to be IANA zones. Missing coordinates produce an error when requested; other rows keep their original indices. Owner, type, hull and payload fields retain NOAA catalogue codes; no unsupported decoding is inferred.

Available extracts

Save the command result in a variable, then use EXTRACT(result, "key"). Availability can depend on the input form and fitted model.

In indexed patterns such as beta:n, replace n with the required index.