David B. Gilhousen National Data Buoy Center, Stennis Space Center, Mississippi
Dr. Harvey E. Seim Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, Savannah, Georgia
Dr. Patrick Welsh National Weather Service Forecast Office, Jacksonville, Florida
The Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SKIO) is installing a network of automated observing stations on offshore platforms owned by the U.S. Navy off the coast of Georgia. The oceanographic and meteorological observing network, called the South Atlantic Bight Synoptic Offshore Observation Network (SABSOON) is being established through National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) funding. At least four of the platforms will take continuous measurements of wind, sea level pressure, air temperature, sea surface temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wave height, wave period, and water level that are of interest to weather forecasters and mariners.
The National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) has developed a plan on how these observations can be transmitted in real-time to National Weather Service (NWS) and private meteorologists using established codes and circuits. SKIO will encode the observations each hour in the same format that NDBC uses for the Coastal-Marine Automated Network (C-MAN) stations, ftp them to the NWS Jacksonville, Florida Forecast Office (NWS JAX) who will then relay the observations to the NWS Telecommunications Gateway for national distribution. NDBC is supplying the encoding software and NWS JAX will obtain the communications headers and station identifiers. This will benefit NWS JAX because these stations will provide the only other observations in their coastal marine forecast area besides those obtained by an NDBC buoy station and a C-MAN station. Because the observations will be read on NOAA Weather Radio and appear on popular marine web sites, SKIO will benefit from the additional publicity. Similar cooperative efforts could benefit other oceanographic laboratories installing marine networks.
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