Robotic Science Network Watches Our Oceans

Roland Piquepaille writes "I bet most of you have never heard about Argo, an ambitious scientific project about the observation of our oceans. This project is endorsed by 18 countries and just reached a milestone: there are today more than 1,500 robotic floats reporting about salinity changes or predicting El Niño events, among other ones. This news release from the University of California at San Diego says that the Argo floats, which are autonomous ocean-traveling robots programmed to sink more than a mile below the ocean surface, are helping scientists all over the world to look at the future of our whole planet. And in 2007, when the deployment is completed, 3,000 underwater robots will help us to better understand the changes in our climate. You'll find more details, pictures and references in this overview."

Comments

Monitor our oceans?

[Mirkon]

Screw the oceans, make them WiMax repeaters and build a global wireless network.

Land based weather 'robots'

[tonsofpcs]

Now if only we had as many Standards Based land based weather observatories/robots, this would make NOAA much more precise (it is already very acurate with its predictions, just a higher level of precision would be nice, rather than each 'site' covering a 50 mile radius (or more).

Re:Land based weather 'robots'

[arivanov]

Same can be said for probes in more interesting places.

If the graph is to believed there are nearly zero probes in the circular current in the Southern Hemisphere roaring sixties, there also very few probes in the other major current systems - Gulfstream, along N and S America West Coast, Azora, etc. At the same time there are plenty of probes which are sitting in relatively silent regions like 30-40 latt in the middle of the Pacific (north and south).

I hope they put the remaining 1500 into the major current systems as these are the places that determine the weather around the globe. It will be more expensive to maintain as you have to salvage them quite often and relocate to the beginning of the current, but hopefully the data collected will pay back for the excessive maintenance costs.

Hmmm...

[anish1411]

This is that bastard organisation that predicted that global warming would actually make the UK colder..

argos animation

[Anonymous Coward]

if an early reader wouldnt mind mirroring the animation on the site , it does describe the project effectively , and shows how a network of 3000 buoys can cover the globe evenly. if at the expense of 26megs avi ...

W won't listen anyway

[HanB]

Doesn't matter how much more data is collected, the point is already made: Our global industry is damaging the environment. And W is not going to do anything about it. Just the same reasoning that keeps M$ from doing anything structural about virusses.

``It seemed an annoyance at first, but later on we realized it is a great source of revenue, so why on earth would we change anything about it.''

• First, they save themselves a shipload of money in preventing the problems.
• Second, they are the guys that will clean up the mess afterwards, for proper rewarding of course.
• They will even be called heroes and nobody will ever disagree with their methods.

BTW the same filosophy applies to another ``global problem'': terrorism.

We have to find a way of unmasking these criminals. They do have a name, the ``neo-conservatives.''

Unsolved Mysteries

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, Roland Piquepaille submits an article, his homepage is http://www.primidi.com/

Coincidence, I think not, conspiracy, yes please.

Roland Piquepaille

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to be said. For reasons I cannot understand, the editors continue to allow roland to post links to his half assed summary of another story in order to generate traffic for his blog. It's horrible to think that we're all providing revenue for this person. Visit google's cache of his page here and don't click on any of the ads. Perhaps in the future, the editors should give a little thought before helping this guy out again.

Re:Uuh...

[plcurechax]

I think it just might be you that did not wach "The day after tomorrow" with its weather and saline bouys.

Unfortunately I did see it (and hence paid money towards the producers and screen writers). What I remember was that the guy next to me was complaining that the bouy id'ents were wrong for the Grand Banks and the "normal" Gulf Stream was moving backwards. Not to mention the physics problems with the rate of freezing mentioned (ending up at/below absolute zero in a few minutes).

I've haven't seen a Argo bouy yet.