Narrator:        This is Science Today. For over thirty years, researchers have known that the oceans play a major role in the climate system. But until fairly recently, there was no way to really observe the interior of the ocean on an ongoing basis. Ten years ago, physical oceanographer Dean Roemmich and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography came up with a revolutionary array of autonomous, ocean-monitoring sensors called Argo.

Roemmich:     Argo is in a sense intended to be like a satellite mission, except it's like a satellite mission that looks at the interior of the ocean, rather than at the ocean surface. There are very valuable satellite missions observing the surface of the oceans, but we really needed was something that could have the observational characteristics of a satellite, global repeated, but yet look into the interior of the ocean and that's really what Argo is and that's what the technology does.

Narrator:        Argo is in its eight year of deployment. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.