AST21 annual meeting

This year, due to COVID-19 outbreak, AST21 and BGC-Argo Science Team Meeting were held online. It was the first ever steering teams in teleconference. During 2.5-hour sessions, Argo steering team met on April 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and Biogeochemical-Argo on April 10th and 20th.

A European coordinated contribution was provided to both Core and BGC steering teams by Claire Gourcuff through the Euro-Argo report and short presentations, covering status of implementation, national funding and related human resources devoted to Argo, deployments, Argo missions, bibliography… Europe also contributed to two ongoing papers:

– the Environmental Impact paper, led by Steve Riser (Scripps), by proposing enhancement to the section on float recovery, especially important in Marginal Seas and for BGC floats;

– the Argo Data Paper, led by Annie Wong (University of Washington), where European contribution to the development of Argo network, float technology and its data system was enhanced.

European initiatives, part of H2020 Euro-Argo RISE project, were shared with AST. They concern data management (machine learning for Argo quality control, presented by Guillaume Maze, how to deal with high salinity drifts in Delayed Mode quality Control by Birgit Klein) and future workshops (2nd OceanObservers workshop presented by Claire Gourcuff, 7th DMQC workshop presented by Brian King and Guillaume Maze, 7th Science Workshop presented by Sylvie Pouliquen).

Contribution also tackled Argo governance and its extensions, with recommendations of (1) including more countries in the Steering teams of Deep and BGC missions and (2) having representatives of the different continents in the Executive Board of AST.

All presentations are available on the web: