PMEL Mooring Operations - Supporting Climate and Weather Forecasting

PMEL has developed the capability to deploy and maintain surface moorings at moderate cost for air-sea interaction studies over the ice-free oceans of the world. The mooring operations support a wide range of in-house research but the value of the effort has gone beyond the walls of the Laboratory. For example, data from the TAO array of over 60 ATLAS buoys in the pan-Pacific ENSO Observing System were used around the world in the prediction and monitoring of the 1998 El Nino. Enhanced ATLAS buoys will be deployed in 2000 to expand the Eastern Pacific buoy network under the PACS/EPIC program, and tropical observations are being extended into the Atlantic with the growing PIRATA array. Heavily instrumented surface buoys have been deployed in the mid and north Pacific that support weather and climate research and include sensors for bio-geochemical studies. An array of buoy systems will be deployed and maintained at 6 strategic sites in the North and Eastern Pacific to provide a real-time Tsunami warning capability and will also report basic meteorological data on synoptic intervals. New systems are under development that will be inexpensive, easily deployed and will be useful in a number of forecasting situations with hourly GTS reporting of surface meteorology. Real time data from moored surface measurement systems offer a number of unique and technically desirable features. A strong engineering effort to minimize costs, simplify deployments, improve data delivery, and increase reliability are being taken to support air-sea processes studies and improved forecasts.

*all at: NOAA - Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory 7600 Sand Point Way NE Seattle, WA 98115

POC: Hugh Milburn 206 526 6169 206 526 6744 (fax) milburn