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The management structure of Argo reflects its dual nature serving both basic oceanographic research and operational oceanography. The World Climate Research Programme's (WCRP) Climate Variability and Predictability Experiment (CLIVAR), through the CLIVAR Upper Ocean Panel, considered Argo at its April 1998 meeting and endorsed it as an important element of CLIVAR observations. CLIVAR aims to observe the climate system, including the ocean, well enough during a sustained period to understand and model climate-relevant ocean processes. Argo is the only global subsurface element of the observing system. As such it ties together many regional measurements and it enables interpretation of satellite remotely sensed surface fields such as sea level and wind stress. In January of 1998, the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) recognised Argo as fundamental to its requirement for global ocean observations in support of global data assimilating models. The Argo Network will provide data for GODAE's models as well as for assessment of model performance. It is a transition from research to operational oceanography. With this background, in July 1998 GODAE and the CLIVAR UOP agreed to form an Argo Science Team (Annex B). Argo consists of a broad-scale global array of temperature/salinity profiling floats. It plans to deploy a global array of about 3000 sub-surface profiling floats in the period 2000-2005 at a horizontal resolution of about 3°x3°. Floats measure water temperature and salinity profiles in the upper 2000 meters of the water column. They drift at constant pressure level (some are designed to drift as deep as 2000 metres), and pop up to the surface every 10 day for a short period to transmit the data in real time via satellite. |
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