| The international Argo project plans to deploy and maintain a global array of around 3000 autonomous profiliny floats, to provide profiles of ocean temperature and salinity to depths of around 2000 metres, as well as ocean currents at that depth, as vital support to global climate studies and in particular seasonal to interannual climate prediction. Each float reports via satellite every 10 days, and the data are freely available to all and distributed in real time on the GTS. As a pre-operational project, Argo is managed by a Science Team, and is supported by a full-time technical coordinator, who operates the international Argo Information Centre, which is a part of JCOMMOPS. This centre provides information on programme status, planned deployments, technical issues and participants. It has links to the Science Team and Argo Data centres. It is expected that, once operational, Argo will become a component of the operational integrated ocean observing system coordinated through JCOMM.
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