Several Important Issues in Salinity Quality Control of Argo Float

Abstract

Several floats that deployed by different countries during the last years over the global ocean, which served as a contribution to the Array for real time geostrophic oceanography (Argo), are studied in this paper with respect to their uniqueness in the Delayed Mode Quality Control (DMQC) process. Of these floats, issues were found in the temperature-salinity relationships during the DMQC, which would easily be misinterpreted or overlooked. This study lists and summarizes the possible situations of the floats that might confront in their observation life, together with the reasonable explanations. The authors present some thoughts on evaluating the performance of the conductivity sensors and calibrating the float salinity data.

Keywords:

• Argo float
• salinity drift
• DMQC
• oceanic events

Acknowledgement

The research is jointly supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (2007CB816001), the National Natural Science Foundations of China (40776016, 40906015, and 40906016) and the Research Project of NMDS (29106006C). The authors express their thanks to the Argo data that were collected and made freely available by the International Argo Project and the Coriolis GDAC that distribute it. We thank the Ocean Climate Laboratory of the National Ocean Data Center (USA) for its work in constructing the World Ocean Atlas 2005. Thanks to Dr. Wei Li for his precious comments and suggestions on the manuscript.