Presence-absence data on hourly acoustic presence of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) were obtained from passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data collected by passive acoustic recorder SV1026 of type Sono.Vault (manufactured by develogic GmbH, Hamburg, Germany) at 78° 50.01' N, 006° 59.99' E, mooring ARKF04-15, in Fram Strait. Passive acoustic data were collected as part of the Frontiers in Arctic Marine Monitoring (FRAM) observatory in Fram Strait from June to November 2012 (recording period) by SV1026 (deployment period from June 2012 to June 2015). The recorder was moored at 743 m depth and scheduled to record continuously at a sample rate of 5,333 Hz. Hourly acoustic presence of bowhead whales was assessed based on automated detections of bowhead whale vocalizations using the LFDCS ('Low-Frequency Detection and Classification System') software (Baumgartner and Mussoline, 2011, doi:10.1121/1.3562166), using an SNR ('signal-to-noise ratio') threshold of 8 dB and a Mahalanobis distance threshold of 1.5. All automated detections of bowhead whale vocalizations were visually reviewed by a trained analyst on an hourly basis in spectrograms using Raven Pro 1.5 (Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, USA; window size: 2.5 min; frequency range: 0-1,300 Hz; spectrogram settings: FFT 1,024, overlap 90 %, Hann window). This table contains information on acoustic presence (indicated by “1”, with at least one verified bowhead whale call present in a given hour) or acoustic absence (indicated by “0”) of bowhead whale vocalizations on an hourly basis for the recording period from June to November 2012.