Frankie deploys a weather buoy near the Arctic Circle

While Frankie is racing onboard 11th Hour Racing she isn’t ‘just’ racing … she’s also contributing towards ocean science research.

This morning, at 1045 CEST (0845 UTC), Frankie deployed a drifting weather buoy for Météo France's Surface Velocity Program (SVP).

The buoy is a small, tough sphere - about 40cm across, weighing around 28kg - packed with sensors. It measures atmospheric pressure, sea surface temperature, and surface currents at 15 metres depth. It has GPS, a satellite link, and a battery that'll keep it going for up to 700 days. Once it's in the water, it drifts freely with the ocean, transmitting data in real time.

The best part? All that data is distributed freely and immediately to weather services, researchers, and maritime safety systems around the world. Every model forecast you've ever seen has been shaped by observations like these.

These buoys are deployed in areas where there's very little existing data,  stretches of ocean that ships rarely cross and satellites can only partially see. In-situ measurements of air pressure and sea surface temperature can't be replicated from space alone and they're essential for understanding how heat moves between the ocean and the atmosphere, and for tracking long-term climate change.

The zone Frankie is sailing through, up by the arctic circle, is one of those gaps. Every data point helps fill it in.

She wrote two messages on the buoy before deploying it. The first, “To my daughter, Harriet, be curious! Enjoy life!” and the second, “Curiosity and science show to us a different world full of incredible nature.”

Within minutes of deployment, Météo France confirmed the first readings were coming through - sea level pressure at 998.1 hPa and sea surface temperature at 5.71°C.

Near real-time data from the buoy is now publicly available and will be updated daily from 1300 UTC tomorrow, Friday, June 12. If you want to follow along, you can track it here: 👉esurfmar.meteo.fr

This is part of our ongoing citizen science program - one of the ways Team Francesca Clapcich Powered by 11th Hour Racing uses every offshore mile to contribute something beyond the race result. The ocean gives us everything, the least we can do is help people understand it a little better.