The XBT bibliography table lists all known research papers which deal with the accuracy and reliability of data from Expendable Bathythermographs (XBTs) as well as cruise reports, notes, and technical reports with references to comparison tests with other instruments, usually Conductivity-Temperature-Depth probes. The main purpose of the page is to provide the XBT and CTD data from the comparison tests to be used to validate XBT drop rate/bias correction estimates and, possibly, to present new estimates based only on direct comparison test data.

The citations are ordered chronologically by publication date, alphabetically within a given year. PDF copy of publications on quality control of the data are found in the "Title" column if available. As much information about XBT investigations as is found in the publications and fits the listed categories is presented after the reference, with a link to the data in the column marked "Data at USNODC". The links are cruise reference numbers from the World Ocean Database (WOD). Following the link will bring up the resulting "CRUISEINFO" page with a geographic distribution, cruise description showing positions of CTDs and XBTs and links to the CTD and XBT data in WOD native format and WOD comma-separated-value (CSV) format. Occassionally, OSD is substituted for CTD. These are cases where only low-resolution CTD data are available, or in a few cases, bottle measurements. In the 'XBT Type' column of the bibliography table, DB = Deep Blue, TSK = Tsurumi Seiki Company, AXBT = Air dropped XBT. If an instrument is not preceded by a company name (Sippican, Sparton, TSK, Plessey, Hermes, Magnavox) the company was Sippican.

The XBT bibliography table is not complete. The "Data at USNODC" column is not complete either. Some comparison data have been sent to the USNODC, but have not yet been processed. Other comparison data sets have been requested, but have not yet arrived.

Special thanks to Franco Reseghetti, ENEA, La Spezia Unit, Italy for supplying a large portion of the citations, and to Ann Gronnell-Thresher, CSIRO, Hobart, Australia for supplying most of the Australian comparison data.