The Southern Ocean is a key component of the global climate system: insulating the Antarctic polar region from the subtropics, transferring climate signals throughout the world's oceans and forming the southern component of the global overturning circulation. However, the air‐sea fluxes that drive these processes are severely under‐observed due to the harsh and remote location. This paucity of reference observations has resulted in large uncertainties in ship‐based, numerical weather prediction, satellite and derived flux products. Here, we report observations from the Southern Ocean Flux Station (SOFS); the first successful air‐sea flux mooring deployment in this ocean. The mooring was deployed at 47°S, 142°E for March 2010 to March 2011 and returned measurements of near surface meteorological variables and radiative components of the heat exchange. These observations enable the first accurate quantification of the annual cycle of net air‐sea heat exchange and wind stress from a Southern Ocean location. They reveal a high degree of variability in the net heat flux with extreme turbulent heat loss events, reaching −470 Wm−2in the daily mean, associated with cold air flowing from higher southern latitudes. The observed annual mean net air‐sea heat flux is a small net ocean heat loss of −10 Wm−2, with seasonal extrema of 139 Wm−2 in January and −79 Wm−2in July. The novel observations made with the SOFS mooring provide a key point of reference for addressing the high level of uncertainty that currently exists in Southern Ocean air‐sea flux datasets.

The Shipboard Automated Meteorological and Oceanographic System (SAMOS) initiative focuses on improving the quality of, and access to, surface marine meteorological and oceanographic data collected in-situ by automated instrumentation on research vessels (RVs). The data management system, from collection to archive, is described along with the benefits of the initiative, providing a model for future underway data collection. Recommendations are made for expanding the current initiative to the wider international community.

As part of the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), hull-contact temperature sensors have been installed on six commercial vessels. Near real-time, quality controlled, sea surface temperature (SST) measurements from these sensors, and thermistors located in water intakes on nine research and commercial vessels traversing waters around Australia, are now available via the Global Telecommunications System. Comparisons with satellite SST observations indicate that the hull-contact temperature sensors and research vessels produce SST data with comparable uncertainties to those available from data buoys in the same region. These IMOS ship SST data will benefit the validation of satellite SST products and analyses, and validation of ocean general circulation models, over regions lacking in buoy observations, such as coastal areas and the Southern Ocean. Enhancing ship of opportunity sea surface temperature observations in the Australian region