North Atlantic Argo Regional Center (NA-ARC)
In 2006 the NA-ARC has first
focused on the compulsory activities: Delayed mode QC activities and data
consistency over the basin. 2006 has been the year where a lot of exchanges have
happened between the teams who had to quality control floats in delayed mode,
i.e. mainly Germany (AWI, BSH, IFM-Geomar) , Canada (DFO) and France( Ifremer,
CNRS, IRD). These teams have shared their expertise in order to process the data
in a coherent way. New CTD data have been collected in the area and shared among
the partners. These data will be soon transmitted to CCHDO.
more information
A method to check the consistency of
Argo data over the North Atlantic has been developed by Coriolis and was
presented at last 2nd Delayed Mode Quality Control workshop in WHOI/USA.
It's based on the use of objective mapping to identify suspicious values in
float data. Out of 11,500 profiles tested, about 5 anomalous profiles were
identified. The anomalies have been notified to the corresponding DACs and have
been corrected. In addition, the procedure allows pointing out some floats that
were not consistent with the reference climatology and/or the floats nearby.
Coriolis has plans to transfer the method to pre-operational end of 2007 if the
remaining scientific studies are successful..
More information
The coordination of the deployment over
the Atlantic has been pursued and the re-seeding of the North Atlantic has
started. Aoml and Coriolis plan to work on tools to better refine a re-seeding
strategy in future. The deployment plans for 2007 are not yet defined as budget
are under discussion in most of the institutes. In collaboration with European
partners of the NA-ARC, a proposal has been submitted and labeled by ESFRI
(European strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure). Early
2007 a call will be opened for all new labeled research infrastructures.
The EURO-ARGO proposal should allow the consolidation of the infrastructure up
to 2010/2011 and prepare the implementation phase. The objective will be to
secure for the implementation phase a sustained contribution from the member
states as well as from the European Commission. The European contribution is
estimated to be about 250 floats per year. This will be achieved through Member
States and European contributions.
More Information
Finally,
a new climatology for North Atlantic based on 2000-2005 analysis will soon be
made available. It's at present under scientific validation. It should be
useful for data quality control, for model as a baseline field in the area and
for the research community. Next step will be to derive indicators for the
North Atlantic.
more information
| 
