The Argo Online School

Argo is an international program that collects information from inside the ocean using a fleet of floats that drift with the ocean currents. The floats move up and down between the surface and a mid-water level measuring ocean variables but spend almost all their life below the surface. Argo has been collecting more than 100,000 profiles per year since 2012, and nowadays Argo is the major component of the Global Ocean Observing System.

Given the amount of data gathered by the Argo network of floats, the associated documentation has grown considerably and can be overwhelming. Therefore the goal of the Argo Online school (AOS) is to teach the basic foundations to use and understand the Argo data. The AOS does not attempt to show everything, since the Argo documentation is available for deeper learning. The AOS is a set of videos and hands-on jupyter notebooks designed to be accessible for high school or graduate students in any discipline, with no prerequisites.

The AOS is organized into three main sections:

1. The Argo Program

In this section and using a set of videos you will learn about:

• What is the Argo network?

• Why do we need Argo and what are its objectives?

• How the observations are done?

• What is an oceanographic profile?

• Technological innovations

• Recap Lesson 1

2. The Argo Data

In this section and using a set of videos you will learn about:

• The Argo General Data Stream

• What are the Argo data and its format?

• Real-Time and Delayed mode data.

• Where can I get access to data and how is it organized?

• Recap Lesson 2

3. Using the Argo data

In this section and using hands-on jupyter notebooks you will learn about:

• The netCDF format

• Accesing Argo data by float

• Accesing Argo data by date

• Aceesing Real-Time and Delayed mode data

• Recap Lesson 3

Additonally we have included Quizzes for the first and second lessons if you want to challenge yourself!

Further reading

More information can be found in the Argo Steering Team web page or the Argo Data Management team documentation

Acknowledging Argo data

Since data are freely available without restriction, to track uptake and impact, we ask that where Argo data are used in a publication or product, an acknowledgement be given.

The Argo Data Management Team assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to Argo documents and datasets. These can easily be included in publications and keep a direct and permanent link to the Argo document or datasets used in publications (to ensure reproducibility). Datasets are archived in monthly snapshots each with its own DOI. To acknowledge Argo, please use the following sentence and the appropriate Argo DOI afterward as described below.

“These data were collected and made freely available by the International Argo Program and the national programs that contribute to it. (https://argo.ucsd.edu, https://www.ocean-ops.org). The Argo Program is part of the Global Ocean Observing System“

Refer to How to cite Argo data for further information.

License for this book

All the content in the Argo Online School (AOS) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

Credits

The Argo Online School has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement Euro-Argo RISE 824131. The video production has been done by Rafael Luis Mendez Peña. Quiz sections are based on John M. Shea work. The AOS has also been possible thanks to the collaboration of the Euro-Argo RISE members and the Argo Steering Team.