Performance of an Air-Sea Interaction Buoy

Abstract

Surface meteorological data from a large instrumented buoy moored in the North Pacific were analyzed and estimates of air-sea interaction fluxes of momentum, sensible heat, latent heat and radiation were made. Good agreement was obtained for one month of buoy operation from redundant sensors for wind speed, air temperature, sea temperature and barometric pressure. Flux estimates were made using the bulk aerodynamic formulas. The buoy data, sampled once per hour, were low-pass filtered to compare with the 6 and 12 h surface analyses of the U.S. Navy Fleet Numerical Weather Central (FNWC) for the area surrounding the buoy. Good agreement was obtained between the buoy data and the independent FNWC analysis.