Global Argo data fast receiving and post-quality-control system

Abstract

Within the past 20 years, the international Argo program has acquired more than 2 million temperature and salinity profiles throughout the global ocean. It has become the most efficient means of obtaining ocean observations from upper–intermediate layers. The profile data provided by the Argo Global Data Assembly Centres (GDACs) are submitted by 11 data centres in 9 countries after undergoing quality control. However, because the quality of the submitted data lacks uniformity, users must conduct post-quality-control processing prior to using the data. For this purpose, the China Argo Real-Time Data Centre (CARDC) has developed a system to achieve both rapid global Argo data reception and post-quality-control processing of all temperature and salinity profiles. Already in operation, the system allows daily transfer of global post-quality-controlled Argo data to various operating divisions. The system synchronizes with the GDAC server once each day, extracts all updated Argo profiles, and then automatically reads the data and performs a post-quality-control process comprising 15 quality control tests. The automatic post-quality-control system can detect errors in observation time and satellite fix, as well as identify temperature and salinity spikes, frozen profiles, density inversions and salinity drift/offset. The data quality following the post-quality-control processing has been shown improved effectively. In the future, it is expected that CARDC will update the Argo global ocean observational data set once a quarter.