The 2014-15 edition of the Barcelona World Race (BWR) has had an active ocean observation contribution that will provide new data about the ocean water dynamics and its environmental quality.
In addition to contribute to the build-up of the Argo system by deploying eight Argo profilers during January 2015, the One Planet, One Ocean & Pharmaton ship carried a Sea Bird SBE37-SI MicroCAT instrument to collect continuous (every minute) sea surface temperature and salinity measurements.
Although the satellite transmission did not work as expected, the arrival of the ship at Barcelona on April 8, 2015, will allow scientists from the Institut de Ciències del Mar to recover the measured data, for calibration and processing.
The One Planet, One Ocean & Pharmaton is the same ship that participated, under the name of Fòrum Marítim Català, in the previous 2010-2011 BWR. In that edition the ship provided continuous temperature and salinity data which proved to be useful for validation of remotely sensed sea surface salinity products. Indeed, the series of measurements obtained by these ships display temporal and spatial resolutions not resolved by Argo SSS proxies and offers additional observations from the poorly sampled Southern Oceans.
References:
Salat, J., M. Umbert, J. Ballabrera-Poy, P. Fernández, K. Salvador and J. Martínez (2013), The contribution of the Barcelona World Race to improved ocean surface information. A validation of the SMOS remotely sensed salinity, Contributions to Science, 9, 89-100, doi:10.2436/20.7010.01.167.