Offenbach / Hamburg (dpa / lno) – The German Weather Service (DWD) will install 50 automatic measuring stations on container ships of the Danish shipping company Maersk by the end of this year. Depending on the sensor configuration at sea, the on-board weather stations automatically measure air pressure, air temperature, air humidity, sea surface temperature and wind direction and speed, the weather service announced on Wednesday in Offenbach. In this way, they contribute to improving weather forecasting and warning management as well as climate research.
“In contrast to the conventional method of weather monitoring at sea, fewer parameters are recorded, but they are determined and sent every hour in consistently high quality,” said Klaus-Jürgen Schreiber, member of the DWD board. Around 200 of the 300 own Maersk ships already participate in an observation program of the World Meteorological Organization and carry out conventional weather observations at sea.
The crew reads the provided instruments and transmits the values to the weather services. Although this allows parameters that are hardly measurable at sea, such as visibility, wave height or clouds, to be recorded, it has the disadvantage that the crew must also have time for these observations. As a result, only up to four observations per day come from the ships participating in the program using the conventional method.
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