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Southern Ocean air–sea fluxes are a critical component of the climate system but are historically undersampled due to the remoteness of the region. While much focus has been placed on interannual flux variability, it has become increasingly clear that high-frequency fluctuations, driven by processes like storms and (sub-)mesoscale eddies, play a nonnegligible role in longer-term changes. Therefore, collecting high-resolution in situ flux observations is crucial to better understand the dynamics operating at these scales, as well as their larger-scale impacts. Technological advancements, including the development of new uncrewed surface vehicles, provide the opportunity to increase sampling at small scales. However, determining where and when to deploy such vehicles is not trivial. This study, conceived by the Air–Sea Fluxes working group of the Southern Ocean Observing System, aims to characterize the statistics of high-frequency air–sea flux variability. Using statistical analyses of atmospheric reanalysis data, numerical model output, and mooring observations, we show that there are regional and seasonal variations in the magnitude and sign of storm- and eddy-driven air–sea flux anomalies, which can help guide the planning of field campaigns and deployment of uncrewed surface vehicles in the Southern Ocean. 

Abstract Advances in uncrewed surface vehicles enable expanded observations in the critically undersampled Southern Ocean—a region vital for global heat uptake. Using data from three Saildrone missions that sampled the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean in both summer and winter, we evaluate processes and spatiotemporal scales of decorrelation that drive sensible heat fluxes. Enhanced heat flux variability is primarily linked to synoptic‐scale southwesterly winds, with decorrelation scales of 50 km and 10 hr, consistent across seasons. These scales are influenced by both atmospheric forcing and oceanic variability, with sharp sea surface temperature changes occasionally driving pronounced shifts in sensible heat flux. Our results extend the observed relationship between wind direction and heat loss across the entire Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean, previously limited to three locations. Our data sets reveal over 8,000 temperature fronts ranging from <1 km to >20 km in width. These fine‐scale ocean processes contribute to the heat flux variability 35% of the time. While wind‐related variability dominates sensible heat flux changes across the smallest fronts, the ocean's role becomes increasingly significant with wider ocean fronts, particularly those over 4 km in width. However, due to their larger abundance, the total change of sensible heat flux over smaller (1 km) fronts is an order of magnitude greater than larger fronts (>4 km). These results highlight the role of fine‐scale atmosphere‐ocean interactions relating to heat flux variability in the Southern Ocean, offering valuable insights for enhancing flux estimates in this critical region. 

Observing air-sea interactions on a global scale is essential for improving Earth system forecasts. Yet these exchanges are challenging to quantify for a range of reasons, including extreme conditions, vast and remote under-sampled locations, requirements for a multitude of co-located variables, and the high variability of fluxes in space and time. Uncrewed Surface Vehicles (USVs) present a novel solution for measuring these crucial air-sea interactions at a global scale. Powered by renewable energy (e.g., wind and waves for propulsion, solar power for electronics), USVs have provided navigable and persistent observing capabilities over the past decade and a half. In our review of 200 USV datasets and 96 studies, we found USVs have observed a total of 33 variables spanning physical, biogeochemical, biological and ecological processes at the air-sea transition zone. We present a map showing the global proliferation of USV adoption for scientific ocean observing. This review, carried out under the auspices of the ‘Observing Air-Sea Interactions Strategy’ (OASIS), makes the case for a permanent USV network to complement the mature and emerging networks within the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). The Observations Coordination Group (OCG) overseeing GOOS has identified ten attributes of anin-situglobal network. Here, we discuss and evaluate the maturation of the USV network towards meeting these attributes. Our article forms the basis of a roadmap to formalise and guide the global USV community towards a novel and integrated ocean observing frontier. 

Ocean surface radiation measurement best practices have been developed as a first step to support the interoperability of radiation measurements across multiple ocean platforms and between land and ocean networks. This document describes the consensus by a working group of radiation measurement experts from land, ocean, and aircraft communities. The scope was limited to broadband shortwave (solar) and longwave (terrestrial infrared) surface irradiance measurements for quantification of the surface radiation budget. Best practices for spectral measurements for biological purposes like photosynthetically active radiation and ocean color are only mentioned briefly to motivate future interactions between the physical surface flux and biological radiation measurement communities. Topics discussed in these best practices include instrument selection, handling of sensors and installation, data quality monitoring, data processing, and calibration. It is recognized that platform and resource limitations may prohibit incorporating all best practices into all measurements and that spatial coverage is also an important motivator for expanding current networks. Thus, one of the key recommendations is to perform interoperability experiments that can help quantify the uncertainty of different practices and lay the groundwork for a multi-tiered global network with a mix of high-accuracy reference stations and lower-cost platforms and practices that can fill in spatial gaps. 

Abstract Proposals from multiple nations to deploy air–sea flux moorings in the Southern Ocean have raised the question of how to optimize the placement of these moorings in order to maximize their utility, both as contributors to the network of observations assimilated in numerical weather prediction and also as a means to study a broad range of processes driving air–sea fluxes. This study, developed as a contribution to the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS), proposes criteria that can be used to determine mooring siting to obtain best estimates of net air–sea heat flux ( Q net ). Flux moorings are envisioned as one component of a multiplatform observing system, providing valuable in situ point time series measurements to be used alongside satellite data and observations from autonomous platforms and ships. Assimilating models (e.g., numerical weather prediction and reanalysis products) then offer the ability to synthesize the observing system and map properties between observations. This paper develops a framework for designing mooring array configurations to maximize the independence and utility of observations. As a test case, within the meridional band from 35° to 65°S we select eight mooring sites optimized to explain the largest fraction of the total variance (and thus to ensure the least variance of residual components) in the area south of 20°S. Results yield different optimal mooring sites for low-frequency interannual heat fluxes compared with higher-frequency subseasonal fluxes. With eight moorings, we could explain a maximum of 24.6% of high-frequency Q net variability or 44.7% of low-frequency Q net variability.