100 Years of Progress in Ocean Observing Systems

Abstract

The history of over 100 years of observing the ocean is reviewed. The evolution of particular classes of ocean measurements (e.g., shipboard hydrography, moorings, and drifting floats) are summarized along with some of the discoveries and dynamical understanding they made possible. By the 1970s, isolated and “expedition” observational approaches were evolving into experimental campaigns that covered large ocean areas and addressed multiscale phenomena using diverse instrumental suites and associated modeling and analysis teams. The Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE) addressed mesoscale “eddies” and their interaction with larger-scale currents using new ocean modeling and experiment design techniques and a suite of developing observational methods. Following MODE, new instrument networks were established to study processes that dominated ocean behavior in different regions. The Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere program gathered multiyear time series in the tropical Pacific to understand, and eventually predict, evolution of coupled ocean–atmosphere phenomena like El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) sought to quantify ocean transport throughout the global ocean using temperature, salinity, and other tracer measurements along with fewer direct velocity measurements with floats and moorings. Western and eastern boundary currents attracted comprehensive measurements, and various coastal regions, each with its unique scientific and societally important phenomena, became home to regional observing systems. Today, the trend toward networked observing arrays of many instrument types continues to be a productive way to understand and predict large-scale ocean phenomena.

Overview of a new Ocean Glider Navigation System: OceanGNS

“…In general, there are many different lessons to be learned about how to optimize underwater ocean glider operations (Davis et al, 2019) and many studies have focused on AUV navigation in particular (Fiorelli et al, 2006;Leonard et al, 2010). Thompson et al (2010) describe a human-in-the-loop, decision-making system underwater gliders in coastal water studies.…”

Preface

“…The first chapter summarizes the role of AMS in supporting the scientific community over the 100 years of its existence (Seitter et al 2019). Thereafter, because the atmospheric and related sciences are primarily observationally driven, the next chapters summarize the systems that have been used to observe the atmosphere and the ocean, both through conventional and in situ techniques (Stith et al 2019;Davis et al 2019) and through instruments installed on satellite platforms (Ackerman et al 2019;Fu et al 2019). Given the importance of the general circulation of the atmosphere (Held 2019) and ocean (Wunsch and Ferrari 2019) in determining properties and phenomena, these topics are summarized next along with chapters describing the dynamics of atmosphere-ocean variability (Battisti et al 2019) and Earth's middle atmosphere (Baldwin et al 2019).…”

Deep Ocean Learning of Small Scale Turbulence

“…T , S , and depth ( Z ) are regularly sampled through global international programs, such as ship‐based efforts like WOCE (Gouretski & Koltermann, 2004), GO‐SHIP (GO‐SHIP, 2018), GEOTRACES(GEOTRACERS, 2019), or globally‐distributed floats deployed by the Argo Program (Argo, 2000) (see Supporting Information for a visual summary, and Davis et al. (2019) for a review (Davis et al., 2019)—hereafter we refer to Supplementary Materials as SM). While turbulence characteristics may be inferred from these T , S , Z data (Polzin et al., 2014; Whalen et al., 2012), such estimates involve many assumptions and uncertainties.…”