University of Washington
ARGO Profiling Drifters
- Introduction
- Automatic data processing & web-page
generation
- Reliability statistics
- Deployment locations
for UW ARGO profiling drifters
- Argos Data Telemetry
- Contact Information
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Welcome to the UW NOPP/ARGO website. The profiling drifter data shown on
this site are sponsored by the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) in
the US. These floats have been deployed as the beginning step in the US
ARGO program. ARGO is an international
program the will deploy some 3000 profiling drifters in the world ocean for
purposes of examining the global scale circulation and air-sea interaction,
with the goal of improving climate models and predictions. Approximately
half of these floats will be deployed by US institutions. The NOPP/ARGO
program is a pilot program to demonstrate the feasibility of carrying out US
ARGO. Partners in the NOPP/ARGO program include the University of
Washington, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, AOML/NOAA, Webb Research Corporation, and Seascan Inc. As part
of the NOPP program it is planned to deploy about two hundred floats by the
end of 2001 as a demonstration of ARGO feasibility. All of the US ARGO
profiling drifter data are available to the ocean community in near
real-time from AOML/NOAA in Miami.
The floats shown on this site are those prepared and deployed by the
University of Washington. We are grateful to NOPP, NOAA, NSF and ONR for
their continuing support of this work.
This web site contains many thousand dynamic objects that must be
updated as new data become available. Examples include postscript files,
jpeg images, tables, HTML files, hydrographic profile data, and data
distribution services. These objects are automatically generated or
maintained in quasi-real-time by an extensible system of autonomous
software. Consequently, maintaining this web site requires no regular manual
intervention.
The reliability of the floats can be measured in terms of the number of
profiles expected during a specified time period as compared to the number
actually executed. Floats are expected to last four years. In the
statistics below, the number of profiles expected for any given float will
not exceed 4-years worth. However, all profiles executed are counted.
Hence, floats that continue to function longer than 4 years will mitigate
the statistics of floats that fail early. These statistics are presented in
the following table (updated daily).
Profiling Drifter Reliability
Profiler Reliability Statistics
for the period from Jul 01 00:01 GMT 2000 to Mar 19 13:54 GMT 2010.
|
Group |
Size |
Profiles Executed |
Profiles Expected |
Reliability (%) |
APEX180 |
11 |
1125 |
1518 |
74.1 |
APEX260 |
876 |
88728 |
102152 |
86.9 |
APF5 |
1 |
29 |
138 |
21.0 |
APF7 |
25 |
2186 |
3425 |
63.8 |
APF8 |
432 |
50634 |
57742 |
87.7 |
APF9 |
430 |
37033 |
42503 |
87.1 |
Alkaline(DP) |
97 |
12021 |
13318 |
90.3 |
Apf9a |
280 |
22206 |
23810 |
93.3 |
Apf9i |
150 |
14827 |
18693 |
79.3 |
Iridium |
150 |
14827 |
18693 |
79.3 |
Lithium |
556 |
52083 |
58211 |
89.5 |
R1 |
1 |
29 |
138 |
21.0 |
Total |
888 |
89882 |
103808 |
86.6 |