Description: The Ocean Reference Station at 20°S, 85°W under the stratus clouds west of northern Chile is being maintained to provide ongoing climate-quality records of surface meteorology; air-sea fluxes of heat, freshwater, and momentum; and of upper ocean temperature, salinity, and velocity variability. The Stratus Ocean Reference Station (ORS Stratus) is supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Observation Program. It is recovered and redeployed annually, with cruises that have come between October and December. During the 2008 cruise on the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown to the ORS Stratus site, the primary activities were recovery of the Stratus 8 WHOI surface mooring that had been deployed in October 2007, deployment of a new (Stratus 9) WHOI surface mooring at that site; in-situ calibration of the buoy meteorological sensors by comparison with instrumentation put on board by staff of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL); and observations of the stratus clouds and lower atmosphere by NOAA ESRL. A buoy for the Pacific tsunami warning system was also serviced in collaboration with the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Chilean Navy (SHOA). The DART (Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami) carries IMET sensors and subsurface oceanographic instruments. A DART II buoy was deployed north of the STRATUS buoy, by personnel from the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) Argo floats and drifters were launched, and CTD casts carried out during the cruise. The ORS Stratus buoys are equipped with two Improved Meteorological (IMET) systems, which provide surface wind speed and direction, air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, incoming shortwave radiation, incoming longwave radiation, precipitation rate, and sea surface temperature. Additionally, the Stratus 8 buoy received a partial CO2 detector from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL). IMET data are made available in near real time using satellite telemetry. The mooring line carries instruments to measure ocean salinity, temperature, and currents. The ESRL instrumentation used during the 2008 cruise included cloud radar, radiosonde balloons, and sensors for mean and turbulent surface meteorology. Finally, the cruise hosted a teacher participating in NOAA’s Teacher at Sea Program.

Description: Funding was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Grant No. NA17RJ1223 for the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research (CICOR).

Description: From May 27, 2018 to June 02, 2018, a scientific campaign was conducted in the Alboran Sea as part of an ONR Departmental Research Initiative, CALYPSO. The pilot cruise involved two ships: the R/V Socib, tasked with sampling fixed lines repeatedly, and the NRV Alliance that surveyed along the trajectory of Lagrangian platforms. A large variety of assets were deployed from the NRV Alliance, with the objective to identify coherent Lagrangian pathways from the surface ocean to interior. As part of the field campaign, an Underway-CTD (UCTD) system was used to measure vertical profiles of salinity, temperature and other properties while steaming, to achieve closely spaced measurements in the horizontal along the ship's track. Both a UCTD probe and an biooptically augmented probe, named EcoCTD, were deployed. The EcoCTD collects concurrent physical and bio-optical observations. This report focuses exclusively on the data collected by these two underway systems. It describes th e datasets collected during the pilot cruise, as well as the important processing steps developed for the EcoCTD.

Description: Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research under Contract #N000141613130

Description: The long-range scientific objective of the Coupled Boundary Layer Air Sea Transfer (CBLAST) project is to observe and understand the temporal and spatial variability of the upper ocean, to identify the processes that determine that variability, and to examine its predictability. Air-sea interaction is of particular interest, but attention is also paid to the coupling of the sub-thermocline ocean to the mixed layer and to both the open ocean and littoral regimes. We seek to do this over a wide range of environmental conditions with the intent of improving our understanding of upper ocean dynamics and of the physical processes that determine the vertical and horizontal structure of the upper ocean. Field work for CBLAST was conducted during the summers of 2001, 2002, and 2003 off the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The 2003 field work was conducted from the following platforms: heavy moorings, light moorings, drifters, F/V Nobska, CIRPAS Pelican aircraft, and an IR Cessna Aircraft. This report documents the 2003 field work and includes field notes, platform descriptions, discussion of data returns, and mooring logs. The 2003 Intensive Operating Period (IOP) was very successful and a high data return was seen.

Description: Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research under contract numbers N00014-01-1-0029 and N00014-05-10090.

Description: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is being built near Thuwal, Saudi Arabia with the goal of becoming a world-class, graduate-level research university. As a step toward this goal, KAUST has partnered with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) to undertake various studies of the oceanography of the Red Sea in order to establish a research program in ocean sciences by the time the university opens its doors in the fall of 2009. Two of the KAUST-WHOI research projects involve deployment of surface moorings and associated instrumentation to measure physical properties of the Red Sea, such as temperature, salinity, and currents, at four locations off the coast of Saudi Arabia. The goal of these measurements is to better understand the evolution and dynamics of the circulation and air-sea interaction in the Red Sea. Two surface moorings and two bottom tripods (PI, Steven Lentz) were deployed at 50-55-m depth near 21°57'N, 38°46'E over the continental shelf close to the Saudi coast. An additional surface mooring/bottom tripod pair was deployed near 21°58'N, 38°50'E at the outer fringe of a reef system directly onshore of the shelf mooring/tripod pairs (PI, Lentz). The coastal moorings carry instruments to estimate temperature, salinity, and fluorescence; and the nearby bottom tripods support instruments to measure bottom pressure and the vertical profile of the currents. Additional instruments, principally bottom temperature sensors, were deployed over the reef system onshore of the shelf moorings. One air-sea interaction mooring (PI, J. Thomas Farrar) was deployed at 693-m depth near 22°10'N, 38°30'E. The air-sea interaction mooring carries instruments for measuring temperature, salinity, (water) velocity, winds, air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, incident sunlight, infrared radiation, precipitation, and surface waves. A coastal meteorological tower was also installed on the KAUST campus in Thuwal (PI, Farrar). These measurements are of value because there are few time series of oceanographic and meteorological properties of the Red Sea that can be used to characterize the circulation, test numerical models of the Red Sea circulation, or formulate theoretical models of the physics of the Red Sea circulation. These measurements will permit a characterization of the Red Sea circulation with high temporal resolution at the mooring locations, and accurate in-situ estimates of the air-sea exchange of heat, freshwater, and momentum. In October 2008, a cruise was made aboard the R/V Oceanus to deploy the shelf and air-sea interaction moorings, and other fieldwork (e.g., tower instrumentation and deployment of reef instrumentation) was conducted after the cruise. Some additional data were collected during the cruise with shipboard instrumentation. This report documents the cruise and the data collected during the fall 2008 fieldwork.

Description: Funding for this report was provided by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under a cooperative research agreement with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Description: AirSWOT is an aircraft mounted instrument for measuring and imaging sea surface height (SSH), and it is similar to the SWOT (Surface Water Ocean Topography) instrument that will be deployed on a satellite in 2020. A field campaign was conducted in April 2015 to examine the performance of AirSWOT and to better understand how the measurement is affected by surface waves and currents. Supporting measurements were collected from the R/V Shana Rae, the R/V Fulmar, and a second aircraft (a Partenavia P68 operated by Aspen Helicopter, Oxnard,CA for UCSD/SIO). From 17-20 April 2015, the R/V Shana Rae, a 50-foot research vessel, was used for collection of Underway CTD (or UCTD) measurements and for deployment and recovery of three EM/APEX floats in a study area off the central California coast. The UCTD measurements are being used to estimate the sea surface height signal associated with variations in ocean density structure. The EM/APEX floats provide time series of the same, as well as vertical profiles of ocean velocity. The purpose of this report is to document the shipboard operations on the R/V Shana Rae and the resulting UCTD and EM/APEX data sets.

Description: This work was performed for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, sponsored by the United States Government under the prime Contract NNN12AA01C between the Caltech and NASA under subcontract number 1523706. Farrar and Girton were also supported by NASA Grants NNX13AD90G.

Description: © The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Gentemann, C. L., Clayson, C. A., Brown, S., Lee, T., Parfitt, R., Farrar, J. T., Bourassa, M., Minnett, P. J., Seo, H., Gille, S. T., & Zlotnicki, V. FluxSat: measuring the ocean-atmosphere turbulent exchange of heat and moisture from space. Remote Sensing, 12(11), (2020): 1796, doi:10.3390/rs12111796.

Description: Recent results using wind and sea surface temperature data from satellites and high-resolution coupled models suggest that mesoscale ocean–atmosphere interactions affect the locations and evolution of storms and seasonal precipitation over continental regions such as the western US and Europe. The processes responsible for this coupling are difficult to verify due to the paucity of accurate air–sea turbulent heat and moisture flux data. These fluxes are currently derived by combining satellite measurements that are not coincident and have differing and relatively low spatial resolutions, introducing sampling errors that are largest in regions with high spatial and temporal variability. Observational errors related to sensor design also contribute to increased uncertainty. Leveraging recent advances in sensor technology, we here describe a satellite mission concept, FluxSat, that aims to simultaneously measure all variables necessary for accurate estimation of ocean–atmosphere turbulent heat and moisture fluxes and capture the effect of oceanic mesoscale forcing. Sensor design is expected to reduce observational errors of the latent and sensible heat fluxes by almost 50%. FluxSat will improve the accuracy of the fluxes at spatial scales critical to understanding the coupled ocean–atmosphere boundary layer system, providing measurements needed to improve weather forecasts and climate model simulations.

Description: C.L.G. was funded by NASA grant 80NSSC18K0837. C.A.C. was funded by NASA grants 80NSSC18K0778 and 80NSSC20K0662. J.T.F. was funded by NASA grants NNX17AH54G, NNX16AH76G, and 80NSSC19K1256. S.T.G. was funded by the National Science Foundation grant PLR-1425989 and by the NASA Ocean Vector Winds Science Team grant 80NSSC19K0059. M.B. was funded in part by the Ocean Observing and Monitoring Division, Climate Program Office (FundRef number 100007298), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, and by the NASA Ocean Vector Winds Science Team grant through NASA/JPL. H.S. was funded by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) grant NA19OAR4310376 and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowed Fund for Innovative Research at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Description: © The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Polverari, F., Wineteer, A., Rodríguez, E., Perkovic-Martin, D., Siqueira, P., Farrar, J., Adam, M., Closa Tarrés, M., & Edson, J. A Ka-band wind Geophysical Model Function using doppler scatterometer Measurements from the Air-Sea Interaction Tower experiment. Remote Sensing, 14(9), (2022): 2067, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14092067.

Description: Physical understanding and modeling of Ka-band ocean surface backscatter is challenging due to a lack of measurements. In the framework of the NASA Earth Ventures Suborbital-3 Submesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) mission, a Ka-Band Ocean continuous wave Doppler Scatterometer (KaBODS) built by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass) was installed on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Air-Sea Interaction Tower. Together with ASIT anemometers, a new data set of Ka-band ocean surface backscatter measurements along with surface wind/wave and weather parameters was collected. In this work, we present the KaBODS instrument and an empirical Ka-band wind Geophysical Model Function (GMF), the so-called ASIT GMF, based on the KaBODS data collected over a period of three months, from October 2019 to January 2020, for incidence angles ranging between 40° and 68°. The ASIT GMF results are compared with an existing Ka-band wind GMF developed from data collected during a tower experiment conducted over the Black Sea. The two GMFs show differences in terms of wind speed and wind direction sensitivity. However, they are consistent in the values of the standard deviation of the model residuals. This suggests an intrinsic geophysical variability characterizing the Ka-band surface backscatter. The observed variability does not significantly change when filtering out swell-dominated data, indicating that the long-wave induced backscatter modulation is not the primary source of the KaBODS backscatter variability. We observe evidence of wave breaking events, which increase the skewness of the backscatter distribution in linear space, consistent with previous studies. Interestingly, a better agreement is seen between the GMFs and the actual data at an incidence angle of 60° for both GMFs, and the statistical analysis of the model residuals shows a reduced backscatter variability at this incidence angle. This study shows that the ASIT data set is a valuable reference for studies of Ka-band backscatter. Further investigations are on-going to fully characterize the observed variability and its implication in the wind GMF development.

Description: F.P. research was funded by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program initially administered by Universities Space Research Association and now administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities, under a contract with National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A.W., E.R., D.P.-M., P.S., M.A., M.C.T. and J.T.F. received support from the S-MODE project, an EVS-3 Investigation awarded under NASA Research Announcement NNH17ZDA001N-EVS3 (JPL/Cal Tech: 80NM0019F0058, WHOI: 80NSSC19K1256, UMass Amherst: 80NSSC19K1282). J.B.E. acknowledges support from NSF under grant number OCE-1756789.

Description: The Ocean Reference Station at 20°S, 85°W under the stratus clouds west of northern Chile is being maintained to provide ongoing climate-quality records of surface meteorology (air-sea fluxes of heat, freshwater, and momentum), and of upper ocean temperature, salinity, and velocity variability. The Stratus Ocean Reference Station (ORS Stratus) is supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Observation Program. It is recovered and redeployed annually, with cruises between October and December. During the October 2007 cruise on the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown to the ORS Stratus site, the primary activities were recovery of the Stratus 7 WHOI surface mooring that had been deployed in October 2006, deployment of a new (Stratus 8) WHOI surface mooring at that site; in-situ calibration of the buoy meteorological sensors by comparison with instrumentation put on board the ship by staff of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL); and observations of the stratus clouds and lower atmosphere by NOAA ESRL. Meteorological sensors on a buoy for the Pacific tsunami warning system were also serviced, in collaboration with the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Chilean Navy (SHOA). The DART (Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami) carries IMET sensors and subsurface oceanographic instruments. A new DART II buoy was deployed north of the STRATUS buoy, by personnel from the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) Argo floats and drifters were launched, and CTD casts carried out during the cruise. The ORS Stratus buoys are equipped with two Improved Meteorological (IMET) systems, which provide surface wind speed and direction, air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, incoming shortwave radiation, incoming longwave radiation, precipitation rate, and sea surface temperature. Additionally, the Stratus 8 buoy received a partial pressure of CO2 detector from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL). IMET data are made available in near real time using satellite telemetry. The mooring line carries instruments to measure ocean salinity, temperature, and currents. The ESRL instrumentation used during the 2007 cruise included cloud radar, radiosonde balloons, and sensors for mean and turbulent surface meteorology. Finally, the cruise hosted a teacher participating in NOAA’s Teacher at Sea Program.

Description: Funding was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Grant No. NA17RJ1223 for the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research (CICOR).

Description: A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study was performed of the wind flow around two ocean buoys used to collect meteorological data from sensors mounted on the buoy tower. The CFD approach allowed wind velocity perturbations to be evaluated as a step towards quantifying the impacts of flow distortion on buoy wind measurements. The two buoys evaluated were the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution WHOI Modular Ocean Buoy System and the University of New Hampshire (UNH) 2.1 m discus buoy. Engineering drawings were used to create a computational mesh for each buoy. Suitable solution methods were then developed and tested, CFD simulations were performed, and the results evaluated. Eleven CFD runs were performed, six for the WHOI buoy and five for the UNH buoy. Highlights of analysis for the WHOI buoy were that horizontal flow distortion was relatively small (〈1%) for head-on flow, but that the tendency of the buoy to establish an angle of about 30 degrees relative to the flow resulted in acceleration at one anemometer location and deceleration at the other. Highlights of the analysis for the UNH buoy were that flow distortion of about 5% at the wind sensor location could be cut by about a factor of two by either raising the sensor by 2 ft or removing solar panels.

Description: Funding was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Grant No. NA17RJ1223 for the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research (CICOR).