Caretakers at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California have been taking the temperature of the surface seawater on the beach every morning at 8:00 AM for over 100 years. In a new open access paper, Larry Breaker and myself run through some methods to fill in the gaps in that data set, look at some of the trends in the water temperature since mid-1919, and highlight some of the studies that have benefitted from the (mostly) diligent work of those water-sampling students and staff over the decades. I was one of those caretakers from 2006 through mid-2008, so there are days in that record where the temperature wasn’t taken at 8AM that are directly attributable to my own forgetfulness, and were part of the corrections implemented in this paper. The daily temperature sampling effort was originally begun by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (after establishing their own daily sampling program a few years earlier) and continues to be updated to this day as part of the Shore Stations program.

We have also provided a copy of the gap-filled and time-of-day-adjusted daily temperature data in a Zenodo archive https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7041718 in case you want to play around with the data yourself. The R code used to generate the corrections and several of the figures is also included in that archive.

The citation for the paper is this:

Breaker, L.C. and L.P. Miller (2023). One hundred years of daily sea-surface temperature from the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California: A review of the history, acquisition, and significance of the record. Oceanography and Marine Biology An Annual Review. eds. S.J. Hawkins, P.A. Todd and B.D. Russell. v61, p 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003363873-2