Recently, Queen Mary 2 has been assisting the Met Office and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Global Drifter Program by deploying 10 drifting buoys across the Indian Ocean as she conducted her passage from Australia to Mauritius.
The buoy deployments were part of a partnership between oceanographers and meteorologists across the globe whose goal it is to provide accurate observations of weather conditions such as currents, sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind, waves and salinity. This data helps improve forecasts by providing observational validation of global surface pressure. This is particularly valuable to our CUK Fleet as it can assist in forecasting strengthening storms and enable our ship and shore teams to plan routes avoiding these areas.
This images shows the Captain, Deputy Captain, Second Officer and Deck Cadet standing by the aft mooring deck ready to deploy one of the drifters and the image below currently shows the location of the buoys which were deployed at intervals of 5 degrees longitude.