Function
The primary purpose of an ocean weather vessel was to take surface and upper air weather measurements, and report them via radio at the synoptic hours of 0000, 0600, 1200, and 1800 Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). Weather ships also reported observations from merchant vessels, which were reported by radio back to their country of origin using a code based on the 16-kilometer (9.9 mi) square in the ocean within which the ship was located. The vessels were involved in search and rescue operations involving aircraft and other ships. The vessels themselves had search radar and could activate a homing beacon to guide lost aircraft towards the ships' known locations. Each ship's homing beacon used a distinctly different frequency. In addition, the ships provided a platform where scientific and oceanographic research could be conducted. The role of aircraft support gradually changed after 1975, as jet aircraft began using cross polar routes. By 1982, the ocean weather vessel role had changed too, and the ships were used to support short range weather forecasting, in numerical weather prediction computer programs which forecast weather conditions several days ahead, for climatological studies, marine forecasting, and oceanography, as well as monitoring pollution out at sea. At the same time, the transmission of the weather data using Morse code was replaced by a system using telex-over-radio.
Read more about this topic: Weather Ship
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.”
—Margaret Fairless Barber (1869–1901)
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—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)