A new method to obtain deep ocean current velocity from argo floats

Abstract

The ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) has been widely used to achieve three dimensions’ current velocities directly at any layer in the ocean. However, the coverage of ADCP is limited. The widely delivery of Argo floats provides a new way to obtain the deep ocean current. To make full use of Argo floats to achieve Deep Ocean current, a new processed unit is posed here. Adaptive Kalman filter is introduced to process the time series. A numerical simulation has been carried out to validate the effect of three different analysis methods for various data source. The simulation results suggest the feasibility and stability of adaptive Kalman filter for the unit process. This method has been applied to the different depth’s Argo floats, and the corresponding error estimation is given out. The accuracy has been improved dramatically compared with the unfiltered.