Cesar Harada, whose work I really admire told me about this project. I think it's quite interesting:
Argo is an international collaboration that collects high-quality temperature and salinity profiles from the upper 2000m of the ice-free global ocean and currents from intermediate depths. The data come from battery-powered autonomous floats that spend most of their life drifting at depth where they are stabilised by being neutrally buoyant at the "parking depth" pressure by having a density equal to the ambient pressure and a compressibility that is less than that of sea water. ... For the first time, the physical state of the upper ocean is being systematically measured and the data assimilated in near real-time into computer models. Argo builds on other upper-ocean ocean observing networks, extending their coverage in space an time, their depth range and accuracy, and enhancing them through the addition of salinity and velocity measurements. ... As the float ascends a series of typically about 200 pressure, temperature, salinity measurements are made and stored on board the float. These are transmitted to satellites when the float reaches the surface. For an animation explaining the project see, ftp://kakapo.ucsd.edu/pub/argo/slides/argo.avi Website: http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/index.html -- Olga P Massanet -------------------------- www.ungravitational.net virtualfirefly.wordpress.com www.vimeo.com/ungravitational _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
