Abstract
The use of unmanned autonomous sailing craft for sustained oceanographic observations could result in sea surface measurements that have higher spatial and temporal resolution that contemporary methods such as Lagrangian floats, moored buoys manned expeditions and satellite observations. Mission-specific autonomous sailing platforms could provide energetically sustainable mission-specific systems to forecast environmental events and to trace the distribution of meteorological and ocean conditions over a long-term period. This paper briefly discusses the motivation for using wind-powered unmanned autonomous vehicles for oceanographic/meteorological measurements, comments on significant historical considerations, outline some current and past work introduces aspects of such a vehicle developed at Florida Atlantic University and concludes by presenting policy issues and recommendations for future work.