Explorer of the Seas Research Program

In 1999, the University of Miami and Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd. in partnership with NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory initiated an innovative private/academic/government program designed to provide long-term ocean monitoring, a stable scientific instrument development platform and a novel public outreach and education program. The Ocean Lab Program, as it became known, on Royal Caribbean International's Explorer of the Seas cruise ship began on October 28, 2000 during the ship's maiden voyage. For seven years, this extraordinary program produced a large data set of complementary, comprehensive atomspheric and oceanographic measurements along the cruise ship's itinerary and provided over 80,000 cruise ship passengers with guided tours of the research laboratories abaard

The program has entered a new phase where the acquistion of atmospheric and oceanographic data continues on this ship and is projected to continue on additional Royal Caribbean vessels in the future. The popular outreach program aboard with a full-time marine technician and a different visiting scientist researcher or lecturer each cruise has been discontinued. During the first seven years of the program, over 300 research scientists from all over the world participated as the "visiting scientist" for cruises in the Caribbean.

This web site is the data access portal for the majority of the measurements from the past program and will eventually contain the measurements from the updated program. The data on this web site are public domain and can be utilized by any researcher, scientist or the public.

The measurements from each separate cruise itinerary are stored in individual cruise directories. These data are in the FTP Data Archive and the documentation link provides information on the contents of the directories and hints on how to utilize the data. During the first five years, the cruise ship itineraries were always 7-day itineraries in either the eastern or western Caribbean. In the summer of 2006, the ship began a wider variety of cruise lengths and destinations departing from Port Cape Liberty in Bayonne, NJ. In May 2007, the ship repositioned to Bayonne, NJ permanently as its home port.