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Many estimates of uncertainties of ship and buoy SST measurements have been made. A typical SST measurement made by a ship has an uncertainty of around 1-1.5K and a drifting buoy observation a typical uncertainty of around 0.1-0.7K. More recent studies split these uncertainties into uncorrelated and systematic components, with the systematic components apparent at ship, deck and nation level. This split better describes the error characteristics of observed SSTs. However, a lack of metadata, most particularly ship call signs, hampers the application of such an error model and it does not capture behavior seen in SST measurements such as non-Normal distributions or systematic errors that vary on time scales from months to years.
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