In the aftermath of the sinking of the US-flagged container ship EL FARO in October 2015, one of the recommendations of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was to explore increasing the collection of weather data from ships in order to improve weather forecast products. Currently the National Weather Service runs the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS) program, where ships voluntarily submit weather observations to NOAA. However, only a small fraction of the thousands of vessels sailing worldwide participate in this program, and VOS weather observations are submitted infrequently via a mainly manual process.
The US Army Corps of Engineers and the Maritime Administration, in cooperation with NOAA have started a project to investigate the feasibility of automating and increasing the frequency of collection of observations by using existing Automatic Identification System (AIS) equipment installed aboard commercial vessels. A processor aboard a vessel will connect to existing or specially installed weather sensors, process the observations and create an AIS message that can be presented to the ship's AIS transceiver. The transceiver will transmit it (without affecting the normal operation of the AIS) and the transmitted message may be received by other vessels, shore AIS stations, or AIS receivers aboard low earth orbit satellites. Once received, the messages will be parsed, placed in a database, and provided to forecasters or others who find the data valuable. This capability has the potential to augment VOS and increase the number of observations collected, fill in gaps in areas where observations are scarce, and improve ocean weather forecasts.