Climatic Data, Oceanic Observations

Alexander Boris

CLIMATIC OCEANIC OBSERVATIONS are marine meteorological and deep ocean observations that are performed for a long time (at least over a few decades) using specialized océanographie vessels, volunteer merchant ships, buoy arrays, floats, and drifters. Marine meteorological observations are performed over a few centuries. Voluntary observations by merchant ships (volunteer observing systems, or VOS) report most of these data. Standard marine meteorological observations include sea-level pressure, air and sea-surface temperatures, humidity, cloudiness, velocity, and direction of wind. Marine meteorological observations have been collected and generalized in the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Sets (COADS). However, the differences in instruments and observation techniques, and construction and size of various ships, reduce the compatibility of different data for analysis of climate variability and change. One of the most comprehensive analyses of this problem has been done at the CLIMAR 99 WMO workshop. Between 1948 and 1984, the Ocean Weather Station (OWS) network operated in ...

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