Commercial fishing vessels around Australia are now towing sensors on their fishing gear, collecting vital temperature-at-depth information between the sea surface and ocean floor up to 1200m depth. Installed on trawls, gillnets, longlines, scallop dredges, traps and squid jigs, data acquisition over the past year has provided millions of measurements (date, location, temperature and depth) collected from coastal waters off the Pilbara in the west, the Great Australian Bight, Spencer Gulf and the Gulf of St Vincent, through Bass Strait, south of Tasmania, up the east coast of Australia to the Coral Sea, into the Gulf of Carpentaria and the most remote waters of the Top End.
Affectionately known as "FishSOOP" (Fisheries Ships of Opportunity Observing Program), the project is a collaboration between Fishwell and UNSW, with initial funding from the Fisheries Research Development Corporation and IMOS, and recently from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority and Northern Territory Fisheries. Not only is the fishing fleet providing a cost-effective platform to collect data to ground-truth our sub-surface oceanographic modelling, there is a keen interest from skippers in understanding the factors that impact the composition of their catch, particularly given the influence of climate change and marine heatwaves on fisheries.