The SAMOS initiative is investigating new technologies to improve the accuracy of SAMOS. Instrumentation developers at NOAA Environmental Technology Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are planning to design a two part roving standard instrument suite that will be used for onboard validation and comparison with a research vessel's permanent SAMOS. The first component of the roving standard will be a state-of-the-art flux instrument suite that will be installed to provide the best possible measure of air-sea fluxes and surface meteorology. A second set of traditional marine weather instruments will be located near the R/V's SAMOS instruments to provide side-by-side comparison with the permanent shipboard sensors.

A trained technician will travel with the roving standard and work with the R/V's technician (over the course of several weeks at sea) to identify discrepancies between the roving standard and the R/V SAMOS measurements. Development of the state-of-the-art flux instrument suite will begin at ETL in 2005. Funding for the second set of traditional meteorological sensors is still pending.