One million Argo profiles

Argo, an international project initiated in 2000, aimed to establish a global network of profiling floats. It achieved its first goal of 3000 operating floats in October 2007 and on 30th October 2012 met another milestone — one million data profiles.

The millionth profile arrived at the Global Data Assembly Centres (GDAC) on 31/10/2012 at 16:50:07. This profile was transmitted by NOAA-PMEL float 5901891, cycle 146.

The Argo folding globe ©

Each year around 800 floats need to be deployed to maintain the 3000-float array This array provides around 100,000 observations per year and floats operate throughout all the ice-free deep-ocean areas of the world.

The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) is a national-level data centre in the Argo data processing chain hosting floats from the UK, Ireland, Mauritius and Saudi Arabia. This represents approximately 4% of the array.

We have updated the folding globe to celebrate the one million profiles — the updated version indicates the current status of the array.