Biogeochemical-Argo aims at developing a global network of biogeochemical sensors on Argo profiling floats. The concept of global robotic biogeochemical measurements was articulated in a Community White Paper (Gruber et al., 2007) that was supported by the International Ocean Carbon Coordinating Project (IOCCP) and the US Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry Program (US-OCB). This was followed by a Scoping Workshop funded by the US Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry Program (Johnson et al., 2009) and an International Ocean Color Coordinating Group (IOCCG) supported working group (IOCCG, 2011). Extensive discussions were held at the OceanObs 09 meeting and were subsequently reported into two community White Papers (Gruber et al., 2010; Claustre et al., 2010).
Recommendations from these meetings were for the implementation of integrated deployments of larger numbers of profiling floats with biogeochemical sensors to demonstrate the feasibility of operating biogeochemical arrays. Following these reports, a variety of regional arrays have been developed with great success. In parallel with these regional efforts, great strides have been made in sensor operation and calibration. This prior work demonstrates the feasibility of operating a global system in order to address fundamental science questions and needs for ocean resource management.
These efforts culminated in a workshop that was held from 11 to 13 January 2016 at the Laboratoire d’Oceanographie de Villefranche (France). The scientific and implementation plan of Biogeochemical-Argo plan was subsequently prepared and open to discussion and inputs by community during summer 2016. With the finalization of this document we now are entering into the exciting and challenging part of the program development.