One of our greatest tools for understanding the earth’s oceans as a dynamic system is a collection of roughly 4,000 international oceanic probes called Argo. The name is inspired by the most famous ship of Greek legend, the Argo, which carried Jason and—who knew?—the Argonauts.
Since it could be terribly embarrassing to conflate the boat with the buoys, let’s start with a brief compare and contrast. First, the name. Argo-the-buoys are named after the famous Jason’s ship because they communicate with a satellite that measures sea level and wave height and the satellite is named Jason. Argo-the-boat was named after the shipwright Argus, son of Arestor, who also voyaged with Jason as an early expert in self-branding.
Some sources say that the Argo was the first seagoing ship, was favored by the gods, and was so new in its appearance that some mistook it for a sea monster. Other sources say it was just a pretty nifty boat. Think of Argo-the-boat as looking like a long, early Greek galley, with dozens of oars, a midship mast, a sharp keel, and a great prow. Think of Argo-the-buoys as looking like a bunch of yard-long aluminum pipes each less than 8 inches in diameter. The buoys are built, maintained, and monitored by an international consortium of 28 countries, with about half of the buoys coming from the United States.
The Argo sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, voyaging from Greece to what is now the modern-day Republic of Georgia. Modern-day Argo buoys are distributed all over the earth’s oceans, spaced about every three degrees of latitude and longitude, and they float up and down the water column from the ocean’s surface to 2,000 feet deep and back again every 10 days, measuring temperature, salinity, and depth. When they surface, the modern Argo buoys use high-bandwidth iridium transmitters to send all their data in under 30 minutes, whereas the original Argo was built partially with magic wood from Zeus’s oracle at Dodona. In times of danger (and, presumably, difficult parking) the front of the boat would cry out in a human voice.
Argo the ship was powered by fifty oars and a sail, while Argo buoys manage their depth with an external bladder and an internal reservoir of oil. When the bladders are empty, the buoys are the same density as seawater and float beneath the surface; when the buoy pumps all of its oil into the external bladder, the buoy becomes less dense than the surrounding water and rises. Onboard power for the buoys’ sensors comes from batteries, whereas the Argo was crewed and powered by up to 50 Argonauts. The Argonauts were a group of generally less-legendary-than-Jason heroes, but their number may have included several of the semi-divine, including, most famously, Heracles, who was just then taking a break from his Twelve Labors and was looking for some day-laboring on the side. According to some sources, he gets left behind early in the journey for weighing so much that the talking boat complains. He becomes the first lost cruise-ship passenger.
The Argo only made one voyage, but the job of the Argo buoys is never-ending. The data from the buoys is made freely available to anyone, and it has so far been used in more than 6,000 scientific papers. It’s also a key contributor to modeling that big, blue driver of so much of our weather, the Pacific Ocean.
To create a local weather forecast, broadly speaking, first observational data about the planet is collected, either by direct measurement from instruments like thermometers, weather balloons, and buoys or remotely from radar and satellites. That information and forecast is then plugged into an algorithm, which is then run to simulate the weather, perhaps multiple times. Finally, in post-processing, those predictions are fine-tuned into a forecast.
A new multi-university research group, funded by a $6.6 million grant from the 2020 Inflation Reduction Act and called the Consortium for Advanced Data Assimilation Research and Education (CADRE), plans to analyze Argo floats data with an intent to improve both our observational coverage of the ocean and the forecasts that come from it.
Oklahoma University Meteorology Professor Xuguang Wang, who leads the CADRE project, says CADRE’s improvements will focus on the first step of developing a forecast: data assimilation. This is where the observational data is combined with a numerical simulation of the weather. Both the observational data and the numerical simulation are huge data sets. The combined analysis of these two data sets provides an estimate of the current status of an earth system, which can be used as the starting point for simulations forecasting the future status of an earth system.
Wang says that these simulations will yield not only a better forecast but, in the case of Argo, also identify critical gaps where the ocean is under studied. Finding these gaps could determine where the Argo floats of the future will be deployed.
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“I’m hoping at least for some of the CADRE results to be adopted into the operational system two or three years after the project is over,” Wang says.
At the end of an Argo float’s life, the battery runs out and it stops surfacing to transmit data. Since it would be insanely difficult and costly to track down dead floats, dead floats are left to drift along under the surface of the sea until eventually their oil bladders fail and they sink to the bottom of the ocean.
At the end of Argo-the-boat’s journey, the ship is beached at Iolkos and left as a monument to the gods, who translate the boat into the stars as the constellation Argo Navis. The boat itself, though, was seemingly left to monument-in-place on the beach, meaning it was still there years later when Jason, having gone through a bad breakup with the sorceress Medea, was looking for a place to crash. One day, while Jason is weeping beneath his old boat, part of the Argo snaps, dropping a rotting beam on Jason’s head and killing him before he can send any embarrassing texts to his ex.
