The Air-Sea Interaction Group in the Physical Sciences Division (PSD) of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) has developed an extensive data base of over-ocean turbulent flux measurements over nearly two decades of experimental deployments. Included in this data base are observations of marine boundary layer structure, fluxes, and surface physical properties, and the combination of these data have been used to frequently update the COARE bulk flux algorithm and to support numerous surface energy budget, atmospheric chemistry, cloud physics, and gas transfer process study campaigns.

Recent efforts include measurement efforts in such diverse regimes as the stratocumulus cloud region in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean off the coasts of Peru and Chile, the trade wind regime of the Caribbean Sea, the summertime thermodynamically stable northwestern Atlantic Ocean, the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and the Gulf of California at the onset of the North American monsoon season.

We provide an analysis of the variability of the mean state parameters variables and turbulent fluxes obtained over these disparate environmental regimes. This analysis will include contextual interpretation of the various local environments. Of particular interest are contrasts between observations obtained in the VOCALS/Stratus region with other cruise data sets.