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Study of animal movements is key for understanding their ecology and facilitating their conservation. The Argos satellite system is a valuable tool for tracking species which move long distances, inhabit remote areas, and are otherwise difficult to track with traditional VHF telemetry and are not suitable for GPS systems. Previous research has raised doubts about the magnitude of position errors quoted by the satellite service provider CLS. In addition, no peer-reviewed publications have evaluated the usefulness of the CLS supplied error ellipses nor the accuracy of the new Kalman filtering (KF) processing method. Using transmitters hung from towers and trees in southeastern Peru, we show the Argos error ellipses generally contain <25% of the true locations and therefore do not adequately describe the true location errors. We also find that KF processing does not significantly increase location accuracy. The errors for both LS and KF processing methods were found to be lognormally distributed, which has important repercussions for error calculation, statistical analysis, and data interpretation. In brief, “good” positions (location codes 3, 2, 1, A) are accurate to about 2 km, while 0 and B locations are accurate to about 5–10 km. However, due to the lognormal distribution of the errors, larger outliers are to be expected in all location codes and need to be accounted for in the user’s data processing. We evaluate five different empirical error estimates and find that 68% lognormal error ellipses provided the most useful error estimates. Longitude errors are larger than latitude errors by a factor of 2 to 3, supporting the use of elliptical error ellipses. Numerous studies over the past 15 years have also found fault with the CLS-claimed error estimates yet CLS has failed to correct their misleading information. We hope this will be reversed in the near future.

Broadband acoustic signals were transmitted from a moored 250-Hz source to a 3-km-long vertical line array of hydrophones 1000 km distant in the eastern North Pacific Ocean during July 1989. The sound-speed field along the great circle path connecting the source and receiver was measured directly by nearly 300 expendable bathythermograph (XBT), conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD), and air-launched expendable bathythermograph (AXBT) casts while the transmissions were in progress. This experiment is unique in combining a vertical receiving array that extends over much of the water column, extensive concurrent environmental measurements, and broadband signals designed to measure acoustic travel times with 1-ms precision. The time-mean travel times of the early raylike arrivals, which are evident as wave fronts sweeping across the receiving array, and the time-mean of the times at which the acoustic reception ends (the final cutoffs) for hydrophones near the sound channel axis, are consistent with ray predictions based on the direct measurements of temperature and salinity, within measurement uncertainty. The comparisons show that subinertial oceanic variability with horizontal wavelengths shorter than 50 km, which is not resolved by the direct measurements, significantly (25 ms peak-to-peak) affects the time-mean ray travel times. The final cutoffs occur significantly later than predicted using ray theory for hydrophones more than 100–200 m off the sound channel axis. Nongeometric effects, such as diffraction at caustics, partially account for this observation.

Broadband acoustic signals transmitted from a moored 250‐Hz source to a 3‐km‐long vertical line array of hydrophones 1000 km distant in the north central Pacific Ocean were used to determine the amount of information available from tomographic techniques used in the vertical plane connecting a source‐receiver pair. A range‐independent, pure acoustic inverse to obtain the sound speed field using travel time data from the array is shown to be possible by iterating from climatological data without using any information from concurrent environmental measurements. Range‐dependent inversions indicate resolution of components of oceanic variability with horizontal wavelengths shorter than 50 km, although the limited spatial resolution of concurrent direct measurements does not provide a strong cross‐validation, since the typical cast spacing of 20–25 km gives a Nyquist wavelength of 40–50 km. The small travel time signals associated with high‐wavenumber ocean variability place stringent but achievable requirements on travel time measurement precision. The forward problem for the high‐wavenumber components of the model is found to be subject to relatively large linearization errors, however, unless the sound speed field at wavelengths greater than about 50 km is known from other measurements or from a two‐dimensional tomographic array. The high‐ocean‐wavenumber resolution that is in principle available from tomographic measurements is therefore achievable only under restricted conditions.