The Ships of Opportunity facility utilises a combination of volunteer merchant and, less frequently, research vessels to collect measurements related to physical, chemical and biological oceanography. As chartered research vessels are expensive and time consuming, the use of volunteer merchant vessels as oceanographic samplers while underway is a central, cost-effective component of the facility. Fitted with various sampling instrumentation such as expendable bathythermographs (XBTs) to record temperature profiles of the water column, merchant vessels form a system of repeat-line sampling of the ocean while undertaking their regular business. The Ships of Opportunity facility builds on similar pre-existing Australian programs by expanding to collect a wider variety of data and increasing the number of vessels fitted with sampling equipment. Target regions for the facility include the boundary current systems off Eastern and Western Australia, the Southern Ocean, the shelf seas across northern Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. Operation of the facility is spread between several sub-facilities;
