Enhancement of Measurements on Ships of Opportunity (SOOP)- Air Sea Flux (ASF) - Research Vessel Southern Surveyor collects underway meteorological and oceanographic observations (including SST) during scientific voyages in the oceans adjacent to Australia. Data products are quality controlled meteorological and SST observations, and bulk air-sea fluxes.
The RV Southern Surveyor operates as the Marine National Facility (MNF http://www.marine.csiro.au/nationalfacility/), and conducts scientific research voyages in all the seas adjacent to Australia.
The Southern Surveyor is a 66m, 1600t vessel and operates under the call sign VLHJ. The ship is configured to perform research in oceanography and climatology; fisheries, marine ecosystem and marine environmental research; a wide range of marine geoscience; and multi-disciplinary marine research.
Cruise schedules are available at http://www.marine.csiro.au/nationalfacility/schedules/index.htm
Real-time, Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is processed from the vessel's SBE 3T (3F or 3plus) calibrated temperature sensor located ~100 mm from the ship's skin in the thermosalinograph water intake pipe at ~5.5 m depth.
Research Vessel Real Time Air-Sea Fluxes, aims to equip the MNF (Research Vessel Southern Surveyor) with "climate quality" meteorological measurement systems, capable of providing high quality air-sea flux measurements and delivered to researchers on a near real-time basis. Observations are obtained from RM Young anemometer (main mast), 2-D Sonic Anemometer (fore-mast), Vaisala temperature/humidity (main mast, port and starboard), air pressure (on the bridge), long and short-wave radiation (Eppley PSP and PIR, monkey Island port and starboard) and precipitation (Osi Optical rain gauge, Rm Young Siphon gauge, foremast).
Data streams are fed into the existing ship data management system, and broadcast via satellite back to Australia 3-hourly. The observations are quality controlled at the Bureau of Meteorology and air-sea fluxes calculated using the COARE Bulk Flux algorithm.
A daily file of 1-minute averages of the observations and a daily file of 5-minute average calculated bulk fluxes are generated shortly after 0000UTC and provided to eMII.
