Happy New Year 2024 (and sorry for the forum being offline some hours) /DM
During the whole of the 20th century around 0.5 million shipboard observations were collected, in contrast the Argo array is delivering around 120,000 new profiles each year and by November 2012 Argo had collected its millionth profile. The increase in the number of ocean profiles measured over the last 15 years, due to Argo, is shown in Figure 3, which also shows the significant increase in the amount of available salinity data.