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Earth Monitoring: Observing the ocean from within

Nature volume 450, pages 780–781 (2007)Cite this article

As names go, it's cleverer than most. At the mundane level, Argo stands for Array for Real-time Geostrophic Oceanography. But the name comes with not just one but two classical allusions attached. There's the Argo, the ship in which Jason sailed to find the golden fleece, a nod to the fact that the buoys that make up Argo were conceived as a counterpart to a satellite called Jason (see 'The Jason project'), which measures the surface topography of the oceans. And then there's Argos the giant, who was blessed with 100 eyes to see in all directions, with only a handful asleep at any one time. The modern Argo puts even that spectacularly distributed sensory system to shame ? it has 3,000 different sense organs spread all around the globe.

The array's 3,000-odd autonomous floats, which look like upended torpedoes, are equipped with sensors for recording temperature and salinity in the upper 2,000 metres of the ocean (see enlarged map). Each float sinks, drifts, bobs up and transmits data to satellites on a regular basis. At its current size the array provides more than 100,000 temperature and salinity profiles each year, regardless of the season or weather. This is 20 times greater than the comparable annual measurements by research vessels and merchant ships, which in the past have been the main data source for this type of oceanography. In the past five years, Argo has more than doubled the total database on some seas that ships steer clear of ? such as the seas around Antarctica in winter.

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Authors
  1. Quirin Schiermeier
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Schiermeier, Q. Earth Monitoring: Observing the ocean from within. Nature 450, 780–781 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/450780a

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