Quality Control of Pre-Argo World Ocean Circulation Experiment Profiling Float Data

Yeun-Ho Daneshzadeh (1), Elizabeth Forteza (2) and Robert Molinari (1)
(1) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory
Miami, Florida U.S.A.
(2) University of Miami
Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Science
Miami, Florida U.S.A.

Profiling floats were deployed in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans as a component of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). WOCE float data were collected north of 6°S in the Atlantic Ocean, throughout the Indian Ocean, in all 3 ocean basins south of 30°S, and in the Northeast Pacific Ocean from 1994 to 2001. The majority of the floats were deployed in the Atlantic Ocean as part of the Atlantic Circulation and Climate Experiment (ACCE). The internationally coordinated Argo project has developed a uniform quality control procedure for the profiling float data collected during this more recent experiment. The WOCE data were edited using the Argo protocols to provide a uniformily edited data-set of profiling floats beginning in 1994 and continuing to the present. The 44,037 WOCE profiles were first reviewed using the 18 automatic quality control (QC) tests developed for Argo. There were 38,135 (87%) profiles which passed and 5,902 (13%) profiles that failed the automatic tests. The next step in the Argo quality control procedure is to have an operator inspect those profiles that failed an automatic test. There were 829 (1.9%) profiles that passed the visual quality control. Thirty five percent (15,474) of the float observations included both temperature and salinity profiles. Of these floats, 11,108 profiles were suitable for the final step in the quality control applied. This step involves using a statistical comparison of the salinity profiles to other hydrographic data to correct for any drift in measurements.