Argo day: good start for the argo floats!

Argo floats are autonomous robots, equipped with sensors to measure the temperature and salinity of water up to 2000 meters deep. Today they are essential for operational oceanography and building more and more knowledge about global warming and marine currents. They constitute a global network but their level of deployment in numbers is still insufficient in certain strategic areas, such as currently in the South Atlantic,

The choice of day and the deployment area were carefully chosen according to the actual weather conditions to ensure risk-free operations for sailors and their boats. The targeted drop zone is located between latitudes 20°S and 40°S , before passing the Cape of Good Hope. This region, where the density of Argo floats is lower, is crucial to enriching the understanding of global ocean dynamics.

By releasing these floats early in the race, Yoann Richomme, Oliver Heer, Kojiro Shiraishi, Sam Goodchild, Sébastien Marsset, Guirec Soudée, Maxime Sorel, Szabi Weores, Jingkun Xu and Fabrice Amedeo are optimizing their sporting performance by dropping off 20 kg of equipment whilst ensuring the integrity of the instruments.

These instruments, provided by Ifremer and coordinated by OceanOps, are part of a global network of nearly 4,000 floats. Once deployed, they will undertake regular dive cycles, collecting data every 10 days for their entire lifespan (approximately 8 years).

Follow the course of the floats, including those deployed during the Vendée Globe 2020, still active today, on the Euro-Argo dashboard.

Meantime a thought also for Maxime Sorel, one of the skippers who had volunteered, whose adventure ended prematurely. Despite his retirement, his team managed to deploy their Argo float on Monday 18 November, during the return delivery from Madeira, at the latitude of Gibraltar. This area is of great scientific interest due to the exchanges between the warmer and saltier Mediterranean waters and those of the Atlantic.