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According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) official economic statistics, over half of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of the coast. At sea, maritime commerce has tripled since about 1960-2010. The National Weather Service (NWS) Marine Program has a mission to provide marine forecasts and warnings for the U.S. coastal waters and Great Lakes, offshore and high seas portions of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and for a portion of the Arctic Ocean (north of Alaska). This information helps protect people and their property while on our nation's waters. Weather and ocean data are critical to the mariner. This is due to a combination of hazards-such as strong wind and large waves-and the fact that the mariner is often isolated. When in peril, rescue of these vessels may be hours or days in coming. Not having accurate and timely weather information and the knowledge to properly apply it increases risk to mariners and their vessels. In coastal areas, NWS provides vital services and products to inform and protect residents, businesses, tourists, and others from hazardous weather and surf conditions. Typically in the coastal community, rip currents and inundation caused by storms and unusually high tides are the primary focus. Techniques of marine forecasting have come a long way, bringing us into the modern era of marine observations via satellite, radar, and buoys and forecasting using sophisticated computer programs. The role of marine weather forecasters worldwide is a complex one and will continue to change in response to evolving technology and user requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the methods of marine weather forecasting in the oil and gas reserves plants in Grand Banks off Newfoundland, Canada. It mentions the move of the Oceans Ltd., a marine weather and sea state forecasting, to develop a substantial approach in marine weather forecasting. It also highlights the use of Weather System Tracking Program to assess errors in numerical model forecast positions.

Since the late 1980s the Met Office has operated a network of Marine Automatic Weather Stations (MAWS) around the United Kingdom. The network includes a number of instrumented moored buoys, which are mainly in exposed open-ocean locations. The anemometry is usually the first component to degrade or fail, often after 6--9 months at sea. Because the buoys are normally serviced on an annual basis, there is a need for a more durable wind system. This paper presents results from the initial deployments of a new anemometry system based on the Gill WindSonic on some of the Met Office''s moored buoys, where the new wind system has been deployed alongside a conventional cup-and-vane system for comparison. The results suggest that the new wind system has shown no evidence of deterioration in its measurement accuracy, even after 8--11 months at sea. However, there is evidence of degradation in the quality of the wind data from the collocated cup-and-vane system. As a result, the new wind system will be deployed across the network to improve wind measurement reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relations between local monthly mean shortwave cloud radiative forcing and aspects of the resolved-scale meteorological fields are investigated in hindcast simulations performed with 12 of the global coupled models included in the model intercomparison conducted as part of the preparation for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). In particular, the connection of the cloud forcing over tropical and subtropical ocean areas with resolved midtropospheric vertical velocity and with lower-level relative humidity are investigated and compared among the models. The model results are also compared with observational determinations of the same relationships using satellite data for the cloud forcing and global reanalysis products for the vertical velocity and humidity fields. In the analysis the geographical variability in the long-term mean among all grid points and the interannual variability of the monthly mean at each grid point are considered separately. The shortwave cloud radiative feedback (SWCRF) plays a crucial role in determining the predicted response to large-scale climate forcing (such as from increased greenhouse gas concentrations), and it is thus important to test how the cloud representations in current climate models respond to unforced variability. Overall there is considerable variation among the results for the various models, and all models show some substantial differences from the comparable observed results. The most notable deficiency is a weak representation of the cloud radiative response to variations in vertical velocity in cases of strong ascending or strong descending motions. While the models generally perform better in regimes with only modest upward or downward motions, even in these regimes there is considerable variation among the models in the dependence of SWCRF on vertical velocity. The largest differences between models and observations when SWCRF values are stratified by relative humidity are found in either very moist or very dry regimes. Thus, the largest errors in the model simulations of cloud forcing are prone to be in the western Pacific warm pool area, which is characterized by very moist strong upward currents, and in the rather dry regions where the flow is dominated by descending mean motions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The value of Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) measurements of 10-m ocean vector winds for marine weather prediction is investigated from two Northern Hemisphere case studies. The first of these focuses on an intense cyclone with hurricane-force winds that occurred over the extratropical western North Pacific on 10 January 2005. The second is a 17 February 2005 example that is typical of sea surface temperature influence on low-level winds in moderate wind conditions in the vicinity of the Gulf Stream in the western North Atlantic. In both cases, the analyses of 10-m winds from the NCEP and ECMWF global numerical weather prediction models considerably underestimated the spatial variability of the wind field on scales smaller than 1000 km compared with the structure determined from QuikSCAT observations. The NCEP and ECMWF models both assimilate QuikSCAT observations. While the accuracies of the 10-m wind analyses from these models measurably improved after implementation of the QuikSCAT data assimilation, the information content in the QuikSCAT data is underutilized by the numerical models. QuikSCAT data are available in near–real time in the NOAA/NCEP Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (N-AWIPS) and are used extensively in manual analyses of surface winds. The high resolution of the QuikSCAT data is routinely utilized by forecasters at the NOAA/NCEP Ocean Prediction Center, Tropical Prediction Center, and other NOAA weather forecast offices to improve the accuracies of wind warnings in marine forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]