Objectives
This lesson will summarize the best practices and techniques for making and reporting weather and sea observations. The material presented here is based on the U.S. Navy Manual for Ship's Surface Observations (COMNAVMETOCCOMINST 3144.E) and will aid you in correctly observing and encoding weather data to complete a shipboard weather observations form, CNMOC 3141/3. This lesson covers a large amount of content. You may wish to work through the lesson in multiple sessions.
After completing this training, you'll be able to:
- Observe and identify the 27 states of the sky
- Estimate the height of cloud bases and tops
- Encode observed weather using 99 present weather symbols displayed on weather charts
- Determine present weather types and intensities
- Determine significant wave heights, primary and secondary wave height, period, direction from afloat platforms
- Determine temperature and dewpoint
- Determine sea level pressure, station pressure, altimeter pressure
- Encode observed elements into Synoptic Code
- Explain how weather observations are used in Numerical Weather Prediction
- Use special weather observation criteria (ice, snow depth, SPECI criteria) to determine when weather conditions require special observations to be recorded
- Perform bathythermograph observations