Ship-Based Contributions to Global Ocean, Weather, and Climate Observing Systems

Abstract

The role ships play in atmospheric, oceanic, and biogeochemical observations is described with a focus on measurements made near the ocean surface. Ships include merchant and research vessels; cruise liners and ferries; fishing vessels; coast guard, military, and other government-operated ships; yachts; and a growing fleet of automated surface vessels. The present capabilities of ships to measure essential climate/ocean variables and the requirements from a broad community to address operational, commercial, and scientific needs are described. The authors provide a vision to expand observations needed from ships to understand and forecast the exchanges across the ocean-atmosphere interface. The vision addresses (1) recruiting vessels to improve both spatial and temporal sampling, (2) conducting multivariate sampling on ships, (3) raising technology readiness levels of automated shipboard sensors and ship-to-shore data communications, (4) advancing quality evaluation of observations, and (5) developing a unified data management approach for observations and metadata that meet the needs of a diverse user community. Recommendations are made focusing on integrating private and autonomous vessels into the observing system, investing in sensor and communications technology development, developing an integrated data management structure that includes all types of ships, and moving toward a quality evaluation process that will result in a subset of ships being defined as mobile reference ships that will support climate studies. We envision a future where commercial, research,

Observing Requirements for Long-Term Climate Records at the Ocean Surface

“…Data from RVs are typically managed at the national level with no dedicated international data management or archival system (Smith et al, 2019). Some nations do have dedicated data management systems for RVs including the US (Smith et al, 2018) and Australia [Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS)], full international integration of such national RV data systems would enable the construction of high quality datasets for evaluation of a wide range of data and data products.…”

“…The continuation and extension of OceanSITES will enable much evaluation of a wider range of ECVs with more independent data, at least for the modern period. RV observations are underutilized for evaluation, mainly because their data management is not internationally coordinated into quality-evaluated archives (Smith et al, 2019). Some potentially high-quality sources of data for evaluation, including from RVs, OWS and coastal stations, may require data rescue (see section "Data and Metadata Rescue") or reprocessing (see section "Reprocessing of Existing Archives").…”

“…Select RVs have the potential, based on their level of technical personnel onboard and typically research-quality instrumentation, to act as mobile reference stations, provided a high-level of quality assessment can be achieved (Smith et al, 2019). This would be extremely valuable to link up fixed point high-quality OceanSITES, particularly if the same RVs are used to service OceanSites, and provide more distributed data.…”

“…Baseline observations should be of good quality, widespread, and provide observations to link the reference and global networks. RVs that do not meet the criteria for reference observations are an obvious choice, but presently their data and metadata are not collected and managed systematically, and there is no globally integrated data management system (Smith et al, 2019). Moored buoys other than OceanSITES are also candidates for contribution to baseline networks, but as for RVs there is no integrated data and metadata management system.…”

Marine Observing Applications Using AIS: Automatic Identification System

“…The NWS currently receives many thousands of weather observations terrestrially on an hourly basis or less, but observations from the open ocean are much more sparse. The NWS has to rely on satellite information to help fill large gaps for offshore conditions, but satellites do not provide full coverage and, as a result, large gaps remain (e.g., Figure 2; Smith et al, 2019).…”