Weather Ship - Use in Research

Use in Research

Beginning in 1951, British ocean weather vessels began oceanographic research, such as monitoring plankton, casting of drift bottles, and sampling seawater. In July 1952, as part of a research project on birds by Cambridge University, twenty shearwaters were taken more than 161 kilometres (100 mi) offshore in British weather ships, before being released to see how quickly they would return back to their nests, which were more than 720 kilometres (450 mi) away on Skokholm Island. 18 of the twenty returned, the first in just 36 hours. During 1954, British weather ocean vessels began to measure sea surface temperature gradients and monitored ocean waves. In 1960, weather ships proved to be helpful in ship design through a series of recordings made on paper tape which evaluated wave height, pitch, and roll. They were also useful in wind and wave studies, as they did not avoid weather systems like merchant ships tended to and were considered a valuable resource.

In 1962, British weather vessels measured sea temperature and salinity values from the surface down to 3,000 metres (9,800 ft) as part of their duties. Upper air soundings launched from weather ship E ("Echo") were of great utility in determining the cyclone phase of Hurricane Dorothy in 1966. During 1971, British weather ships sampled the upper 500 metres (1,600 ft) of the ocean to investigate plankton distribution by depth. In 1972, the Joint Air-Sea Interaction Experiment (JASIN) utilized special observations from weather ships for their research. More recently, in support of climate research, 20 years of data from the ocean vessel P ("Papa") was compared to nearby voluntary weather observations from mobile ships within the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set to check for biases in mobile ship observations over that time frame.