Argo Project

My name is Carol Brieseman and I am a Primary Teacher on a bit of a sabbatical from school. I won a Primary Science Teacher Fellowship and am based at The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in Wellington, NZ.

Over the next 6 months I’ll be learning all about Argo floats: how they work, what they tell us and why they are important to scientific research. Argo Floats are a very cool technology that measures temperature and salinity in our oceans. We need this information to help us with climate, weather, and ocean research.

Argo Floats are like Underwater Robots that float around at about 1000m below sea level. They float here for 9 days, then sink down to about 2000m in depth before they come up to the surface.

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On its way up, an Argo Float measures temperature and salinity through the water column. Once it’s on the surface, it transmits that data to a satellite and then repeats the process, sinks back down to 1,000 metres, spends another 9 days drifting around. The information that is picked up from an Argo is available for anyone to see. How about adopting an Argo Float close to where you are located and comparing the data it shows about the ocean near you to others in your Quad Blog. You could take this further with graphing and map work activities.
More information on Argo Floats is found here. This wiki is a work in progress and I am adding more data to it.

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If you are interested in linking your Quad to Argos that are near to your location as a mini Quad Project then please do get in touch with me and I will talk through how you could run a project and help you get set up:

carol.brieseman@hamptonhill.school.nz

 

 

 

 

One Response to Argo Project

  1. spacer Ross Mannell says:
    February 16, 2012 at 12:42 am

    Hello Argo Project and all you Quadbloggers,

    This is a great opportunity to incorporate some practical science into the classroom. Our oceans are such an important part of our environment. I hope many of you are able to take up the offer of linking your Quad to nearby Argos. Imagine being able to compare data from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia. How interesting would that be?

    @RossMannell
    Teacher, NSW, Australia

    Reply

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