International Argo Program wins award

The international Argo Program, which includes NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, was recently awarded the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Corporate Innovation Award “for innovation in large-scale autonomous observations in oceanography with global impacts in marine and climate science and technology.”

The Argo program began in 1998 when a team of international scientists proposed the idea for a global array of autonomous floats to obtain temperature and salinity measurements of the upper 2,000 meters (1.2 miles) of the global ocean. The array of floats, called Argo, would go on to be endorsed as a pilot program of the Global Ocean Observing System and be used to fill in the large data gaps in ocean observations. The Argo Program has collected, processed, and distributed over two million vertical profiles of temperature and salinity from the upper ocean in the past two decades.