Julie Fletcher Manager Marine Observations, NZ Chair, VOS Panel PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg, Germany. Status of the VOS Scheme & PMO Network

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 2  Total number VOS ships Dec 2005 = 5429 (Sel 3482, Supp 908, Aux 888, Other 151)  Number of VOSClim ships = 136  Number of Countries with VOS Fleet = 53 Global VOS

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 3 Global VOS Numbers

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 4 VOS Numbers  Counts taken from last quarter (Dec 2005) Pub 47  Numbers only as good as the submissions made by NMS  WMO advises that many countries, including some with large VOS fleets have not sent updates for some time, and there are some duplicate entries, where the same ship is listed on the VOS of more than one country.

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 5 BBXX in January 2006

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 6 Number of BBXX Obs in 2005  Total number of BBXX messages in 2005 = 2,666,443 approx 220,000 BBXX/month  Numbers from MeteoFrance - ‘Obs counters’  EUCOS ships (10 countries) 525,255  Non EUCOS (17 countries) 350,687  Unknown ships 177,992  BBXX Total from ships 1,053,934  ODAS observations 1,612,509

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 7 TOR for All VOS

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 8 PMO Network  34 Countries with PMOs (from VOS FP List)  Total of 108 PMO + HQ people listed  Gaps in coverage in Central & Western South America and Brazil, Italy, Spain, West Africa and China (except Hong Kong)  Trend shows declining numbers of PMOs

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 9 VOS Automation  Steady increase in use of electronic logbooks since 2003 Use of Electronic Logbooks  Numbers of Automated Systems growing slowly Automated Observing Shipboard Systems  Lack of long term stability, difficulty in siting instruments for best exposure, possible loss of AWS with ship withdrawal and cost of AWS all are challenges to increased automation

PMO-III, March 2006, Hamburg. 10