The Bunker Data Set

Weather logs from merchant ships and other marine reports are available from the National Climatic Center, Asheville, U.S.A. in unified formats in the so-called TDF-11 data deck. In a study of the surface energy fluxes of the North Atlantic Ocean Bunker (1976) obtained 12 million observations from 66 Marsden Squares in the North Atlantic Ocean and, after an additional quality check, processed nearly 8 million of them, covering the period 1941 to 1972. Since the TDF-11 data deck is a collection of marine weather reports from several national weather services and organisations (Table 1), the data coverage for the period mentioned is the best available.