Study of Transport Variations in the Kuroshio Extension System at 35° N, 147° E Based on the Data of Argo Floats and Satellite Altimetry

摘要

Beginning from 2005, measurements with Argo floats have been carried out over the major part of the basin of the World Ocean. The level of coverage of 3000 simultaneously operating floats (on average, one float over three degrees square), which was declared during the development of the Argo program, was gained in November 2007. Currently, approximately 3600 Argo floats perform autonomous sounding of the upper two-kilometer water column of the ocean from Antarctica to Spitsbergen with a 10-day time interval. Owing to this fact, the temperature and salinity database of the World Ocean increases every month by 10000 full-scale profiles. It can be supplemented by 10000 Lagrangian trajectories, which allow us to estimate the velocities of the displacement of floats while they are at the surface or at the drift depth at an approximate depth of 1000 m. The continually replenished dataset of measurements make possible solution of the problems of reconstructing and monitoring the state of the ocean in a regime close to the real-time basis and study of the peculiarities of the ocean dynamics and its variability. The large number of profiles accumulated within the Argo program from 2001 to 2013 (the total number of measured profiles is approaching 1 million) allows us to estimate the climatic state of the World Ocean in the last decade and give an estimate of the current intraclimatic trends.