Test and Evaluation of Refreshed Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) Buoy System

NOAA's National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) operates the 55 Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) buoy sites near the Pacific Equator arranged in a grid from latitude 8N to 8S and longitude 65E to 95W. Many of the existing TAO components are obsolete or no longer available or supported by the manufacturers. So to ensure the future of TAO, NDBC designed and developed a refreshed TAO buoy system to ensure sustained and smooth operations of the TAO array. To make sure that the refreshed TAO system can provide equal or better data quality from the refreshed TAO buoy system, various lab and field tests were conducted so far: (1) A lab test was conducted at NDBC by comparing the existing TAO and the refreshed TAO systems; (2) Two refreshed TAO buoys were deployed in the Gulf of Mexico for field testing; and (3) Two refreshed TAO buoys were deployed in the Pacific Ocean next to two existing TAO buoys for inter-comparison testing in the field. This paper describes these tests and presents some results.