NOAA has deployed saildrone uncrewed surface vehicles in many parts of the world’s ocean. Examples can be found at https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/saildrone-hurricane/. They made observations of many variables near the sea surface both in the atmosphere and in the ocean. These variables are critical to interactions between the ocean and atmosphere and must be accurately reproduced by numerical models for reliable weather and climate predictions. In this project, observations from saildrones are used to validate output from numerical models to assess the degree to which these models are capable of reproducing and predicting the variability near the sea surface under various conditions, including some extreme conditions such as near Arctic sea ice and under hurricanes.