Measurements of the Air-Sea Interface from an Instrumented Small Buoy

An instrumented spar buoy, Met-on-a-Stick (MOAS), was designed, deployed, and validated for measuring the air sea interface processes at multiple levels. This system was deployed in June 2010 off the coast of California, and January and February 2011 in Monterey Bay. The system provides mean measurements of wind, temperature, and humidity at multiple levels within 3 m above the sea surface and measurements of sea surface temperature at three levels below ocean surface. It is small enough to be deployed and retrieved by two people. This thesis work introduces the design and the instrumentation of the system and evaluates the ability of the system for characterizing near-surface vertical variations of the marine boundary layer. The results indicate that the platform performance is as expected and is capable of providing measurements to characterize the fine variations close to the air-sea interface. We foresee a broad use of the MOAS in the future due to its low-cost and ease of deployment. Future improvements of the system include the use of better wind and GPS sensors to increase the quality of wind and wave measurements from the MOAS. The original document contains color images.