NOMAD buoys: an overview of forty years of use

The Navy Oceanographic Meteorological Automatic Device (NOMAD) buoy was developed by the U.S. Navy (USN) in the late 1940s as an offshore autonomous meteorological platform. Between 1951 and 1970, 21 NOMAD buoys were built and deployed in a wide range of locations. In 1974, the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) acquired several of these NOMAD buoys, and since that time has used the hulls as meteorological and oceanographic data buoys. The NOMAD buoy has excellent performance characteristics and is the principal hull used on NDBC´s remote stations in the north Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. NDBC modified the internal compartmentation and structural design of the buoy to reduce its acquisition cost, and has constructed 24 additional NOMAD hulls of this value-engineered (VE) design. The NOMAD design has also been adapted for use by Environment Canada, and it was the basis for a boat-shaped buoy developed in Japan. This paper reviews the history of the NOMAD buoy´s development, highlights its physical characteristics, discusses its accomplishments in the 40 years of use as an ocean data acquisition system (ODAS) buoy, and describes plans for future NDBC applications of the buoy