zlacker

NOAA is very hit or miss with their data. I spent a lot of time this summer with the NOAA buoy data. So much of it is available and well documented. The historical and live CSV's are useful, but there is also the stuff where a column name doesn't link up to any of the docs and you have to dig through papers and reverse engineer the correct equation.

The biggest downside is the buoy's are rather old so you don't get a lot of data. Nowadays we could design a buoy that streamed back all of its raw data. But the buoys are designed with bandwidth constrained hardware so they do the analysis on the machine and return the summary results infrequently. It really limits what you're able to do with the data. Especially holding back from machine learning capability.

>>nbardy+(OP)
I was using very basic factors - temperature and humidity primarily. I never ran into that issue, but I could certainly see it being a challenge.

Out of curiosity, what have you been using buoy data for?