Project ARGO - monitoring Earth's oceans

Argo is a system of 3600 floating mini-laboratories observing the temperatures, salinity, and currents in the oceans. What are they finding?

06 January 2015

Interview with

Philip Sutton, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand

Part of the show Dissolving teaspoons: Naked in Wellington

Argo-float_full_size_landscape.jpg

Argo floats only spend a short time at the surface, while they send data to a satellite. They then sink to 1500m and drift with the current.

Credit:

2004 Sabrina Speich, Argo Information Centre

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"Argo" is a system for observing the temperature, salinity, and currents in the Earth's oceans. Operational since the early 2000s, the data it provides are used in climate and oceanographic research and a special research interest is to quantify the ocean heat content (OHC). It consists of a fleet of 3600 drifting profiling floats deployed worldwide. Each Argo float weighs 20-30 kg, as oceanographer Philip Sutton, from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, explains to Chris Smith and Simon Morton...