Weather ship
Weather observations from ships continue from a fleet of voluntary merchant vessels in routine commercial operation.
[9] Another early proposal for weather ships occurred in connection with aviation in August 1927, when the aircraft designer Grover Loening stated that "weather stations along the ocean coupled with the development of the seaplane to have an equally long range, would result in regular ocean flights within ten years.
[5] Starting in 1939, United States Coast Guard vessels were being used as weather ships to protect transatlantic air commerce, as a response to the crash of Pan American World Airways Hawaii Clipper during a transpacific flight in 1938.
[18] By February 1941, five 327-foot (100 m) United States Coast Guard cutters were used in weather patrol, usually deployed for three weeks at a time, then sent back to port for ten days.
[2] The flying of fighter planes between North America, Greenland, and Iceland led to the deployment of two more weather ships in 1943 and 1944.
However, after the war ended, the ships were withdrawn from service, which led to a loss of upper air weather observations over the oceans.
[1] The United Kingdom used Royal Navy corvettes to operate their two stations, and staffed crews of 53 Met Office personnel.
[8] In the Atlantic, weather vessel F ("Fox") was discontinued on September 3, 1949, and there was a change in location for ships D ("Dog") and E ("Easy") at the same time.
In 1949, the minimum number of weather ships operated by the United States was decreased to ten, and in 1954 the figure was lowered again to nine, both changes being made for economic reasons.
The Korean War led to the discontinuing of weather vessel O ("Oboe") on July 31, 1950 in the Pacific, and ship S ("Sugar") was established on September 10, 1950.
[24] On March 20, 1952, Vessels N ("November") and U ("Uncle") were moved 32 to 48 kilometres (20 to 30 mi) to the south to lie under airplane paths between the western United States coast and Honolulu, Hawaii.
[13] In 1956 USCGC Pontchartrain, while stationed at N ("November"), rescued the crew and passengers of Pan Am Flight 6 after the crippled aircraft diverted to the cutter's position and ditched in the ocean.
In addition to the routine hourly weather observations and upper air flights four times a day, two Soviet ships in the northern and central Pacific Ocean sent meteorological rockets up to a height of 80 kilometres (50 mi).
This recall was blamed for the minimal warning given in advance of the Great Storm of 1987, when wind speeds of up to 149 km/h (93 mph) caused extensive damage to areas of southern England and northern France.
[35] Beginning in 1951, British ocean weather vessels began oceanographic research, such as monitoring plankton, casting of drift bottles, and sampling seawater.
[36] 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.
[37] 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.
[5] Upper air soundings launched from weather ship E ("Echo") were of great utility in determining the cyclone phase of Hurricane Dorothy in 1966.
[38] 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.
[5][39] 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.
