A Preliminary Evaluation of Ship Data in the Equatorial Western Pacific

The quality of ship data within the equatorial western Pacific is investigated by using statistical analyses and by comparison with data from neighboring island stations extracted from National Weather Service analyses. Results indicate that ship-measured sea surface temperature has an inherently sm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of atmospheric and oceanic technology 1988-04, Vol.5 (2), p.251-258
Main Authors: Morrissey, Mark L., Lander, Mark A., Maliekal, Jose A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The quality of ship data within the equatorial western Pacific is investigated by using statistical analyses and by comparison with data from neighboring island stations extracted from National Weather Service analyses. Results indicate that ship-measured sea surface temperature has an inherently small spatial scale. Conversely, surface pressure, has an inherently large spatial scale, which permits sparse measurements to record large-scale variations precisely. On the average, ship-measured wind, spatially averaged within a lane located near 150 degrees E, is as good a measure of the large-scale wind flow as the winds recorded at the sparse island stations within the western Pacific. Inaccuracies in the spatially averaged ship elements indicate that additional smoothing of the data is required.
ISSN:0739-0572
1520-0426
DOI:10.1175/1520-0426(1988)005<0251:APEOSD>2.0.CO;2