Shipboard Meteorological Data System

This paper describes a shipboard system which records true wind as averaged north and east vectors every six minutes on digital tape. Also recorded are air temperature, sea surface temperature, dew point, solar radiation, and ship speed and heading. In addition to recording the data, the system provides a continuous TV-type display of quantities in engineering units at a central location on the ship. Since the system is computer controlled and programmed in the BASIC language, it can be easily expanded and reconfigured for different applications. An extensive data set taken manually on the R/V Atlantis II JASIN cruise and from a nearby moored buoy is compared with the computer-acquired data set to verify the quality of the latter.