>> Acknowledgments

Many agencies have played important roles in the development of the Argo and Global Temperature-Salinity Profile Programs data systems. These include the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Bureau of Meteorology, and Oceanographic Data Centre, the British Oceanographic Data Centre , the Bundesamt fuer Seeschiffahrt und Hydrographie, the Canadian Integrated Scientific Data Management, the Indian National Center for Ocean Information Service, the Japanese Oceanographic Data Centre, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, the Korean Meteorological Agency, the French Surface and Subsurface Data Centre, the U.S. Fleet Numerical Oceanographic Center and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Without their efforts, this compilation of data and information would not have been possible. Special thanks are extended to the Ship of Opportunity Program of the Joint WMO-IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology for being a major data contributor.

This work was partially supported by the NOAA PRIDE (Pacific Region Integrated Data Enterprise) and HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communications) programs.