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www.sea-technology.com June 2015 / st 41 F or the study of climate and its variability, the oceans are good indicators. The Mediterranean Sea, semi-enclosed and connected to the Atlantic Ocean by the Strait of Gi- braltar in the west, is a small ocean that covers an area of about 2.5 million square kilometers, with an average depth of 1,500 meters. Here, we can observe many of the physi- cal processes that characterize the general circulation of the oceans, like phenomena of air-sea interaction and deep or intermediate water formation, thermohaline circulation cells and intense mesoscale dynamics. The small dimen- sions of its basin permit the study of all these phenomena using numerical models. In the characterization of Mediterranean dynamics, the validation of numerical ocean forecasting models and in cli- matological studies, continuous measurements are neces- sary along the whole basin. Fifteen years ago, projects fund- ed by the European Union started to aim for the realization of an integrated network of data acquisition and forecast release. It is well known that different techniques are avail- able to provide information; i.e., remote monitoring via sat- ellite data is a very important component of surface-water monitoring, but in-situ measurements are always necessary. For these projects, the use of commercial ships for meteo- marine monitoring greatly helps to obtain a more complete data set. Such monitoring activities require the deployment of instruments by scientists, technicians or crew, and installa- tion of sensors on travelling ships. Since September 1999, expendable probes (mainly XBT) have been dropped in order to monitor the temperature of the seawater column along some transects across the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2005, foating sensors (such as Argo foats) are sometimes deployed to measure temperature and salinity. Atmospheric parameters can be recorded through automated weather stations, usually installed on containerships and transmit- ting data in near real time to remote collecting centers. For example, at the end of 2010, the European project E-Surf- mar funded by EuMetNet (the network of European Meteo Services), started its data acquisition in the Mediterranean. The use of onboard instrumentation on commercial ships has not been a traditional source of data for scientifc appli- cations, possibly due to the diffculty of fnding ships/com- panies to participate, as well as the lack of knowledge of the type of equipment installed on board and its accuracy for scientifc purposes. In September 2014, thanks to the essential collaboration of Grandi Navi Veloci (GNV) Shipping Co., based in Ge- noa, Italy, and the masters and crew of the Ro-Ro/passenger ship La Superba, the Italian National Agency for New Tech- nologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) and Italy's Institute for the Coastal Marine Environ- ment (IAMC) started to analyze data provided by an onboard Ocean Monitoring From Ships of Opportunity in the Mediterranean Gathering Scientifc Marine Data From Instruments on Commercial Ships By Alberto Ribotti • Alvaro Bucci • Franco Reseghetti The route between Genoa and Palermo through the Ligurian and the Tyrrhenian seas. The dots are points of data acquisi- tion.