H. Thomas Rossby, Professor of Oceanography Graduate School of Oceanography
		For many years and without fanfare, merchant marine vessels have played a critical role in reporting the weather over the high seas. Several times a day they make scheduled weather and sea-state observations and report these by radio to meteorological agencies. Without question, these reports provide a vital service to the agencies and their weather forecasting services. These same observations, in archival form, are enormously important in preparing climatologies (wind, waves, wave swell, temperature, etc.) of the ocean and how these parameters vary over time. It would be difficult to overstate the importance that these observations have had on today's studies of climate variability. At the same time, however, the lack of routine subsurface observations of the ocean makes it far more difficult to document changes taking place in the water column and what these may portend for future climate change. But this is changing, thanks to a growing database of upper ocean observations, primarily of temperature, but more recently of currents, surface salinities, and zooplankton biomass. In this issue of Maritimes, we report on some of the ways that volunteer observing ships (VOS), of the merchant marine help us increase our knowledge and understanding of the structure and the climate of the oceans. The now classical expendable bathythermograph (XBT) has been in use on VOSs since the 1970s. Starting in the early 1990s, a few ships have been measuring upper-ocean currents using an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) on a regular basis. It is amazing what repeat observations along the same ship track can tell us about changes taking place, particularly on times scales of years or longer. Only through persistent observation can we uncover these changes. They may seem slight, but their significance can be enormous. It is important to study the role of technology in facilitating and improving our ability to monitor the ocean. Remote sensing by satellites has been an enormous resource for studies of the ocean surface but, on the whole, it tells us very little about the ocean interior. This is where VOSs could play a much expanded role--monitoring the ocean without burdening the ships' operations. The technologies employed on VOSs today represent a big improvement but, with the exception of the XBT, they have simply been ported over from research vessels and are not designed for automated use. There is tremendous opportunity to develop methods of observation that are intended for use by container vessels operating at high speed. Since these vessels provide near-global access to the ocean on a regular basis and the techniques need not be expensive when mass-produced, with a reasonable investment our ability to sample and track changes in the interior of the ocean could be vastly improved. For those of us who have had the opportunity to work with volunteer observing vessels, what has been particularly gratifying is the willingness of the crew to help out. Perhaps better than anyone, they appreciate the importance of understanding the marine environment and the processes that define its behavior.