Climate Videos

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Well, I’ve been sailing a few times, I don’t consider myself a great sailor but I feel English when I enjoy the ocean. It’s terribly important because you can’t take a boat out, a sailing boat particularly, you can’t take any sort of boat out unless you have some idea of the weather forecast because there’s nothing more terrifying, and fortunately I haven’t been in storms that bad, than being stuck in an appalling storm at sea, when you’re facing kind of life and death situations. And the sea should always be respected, it’s a huge power that the ocean has, and you daren’t take a boat out unless you’ve some idea of the incoming weather, And men used to do it, sailors used to do it, and it was based on their experience of the tides, and where they were sailing, and the time of year, but a lot of it was educated guesswork. But for the modern sailor it’s a lot easier now, but yes the weather’s all important I reckon.

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The Argo itself, it’s like a huge torpedo which is to be dropped all over the world’s oceans, and submerges to a particular type of depth, and they can control the depth that this system can drop to. It then records data which is then beamed up to the satellite and all that information is collated around the world. What the Argo project aims to do is to get a much more accurate reading of the world’s oceans’ currents and temperature beneath the surface as well. That’s very important, it’s been very difficult up to now to accurately record the temperature beneath the ocean, and we know quite clearly now that the temperature of the ocean is directly related to hurricane systems and things like that. So if scientists were able to get a more accurate reflection of the temperature in the world’s oceans and the speed in which they’re flowing, then they can then more accurately predict weather systems much more in advance than we’re able to do now.

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Well it’s very recent, it’s just about to start, I don’t think that they’ve actually started dropping hundreds of them yet, so I think they’re about to implement this system. And it’s an international system, it’s funded by so many countries across the world. And it has to be, because it has to be dropped, thousands of them are dropped in the oceans all over the world. And to do that, they have to enlist the help of ships that are sailing across the ocean and ask them for a favour, you know, can you drop this in the ocean at this point? Planes will drop them. So I’m not quite sure exactly when that starts but it’s either started or it’s starting very soon. It will take some time to place all these Argo satellite relaying torpedoes if you like across the world’s oceans. And then of course it will take a while for them to drop to a certain depth and then it will take them possibly a number of years to collate that information that’s coming back up, so it’s a long-term project.

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The effect that the Argo project will have on our weather forecasting is quite dramatic. What it will be able to tell them more accurately is through the temperature of the world’s oceans, and the way in which that temperature is changing and flowing, has a direct relationship with our weather systems. In other words if the hot current sweeps across the Pacific Ocean for a certain speed and hits South America, this is very in layman’s terms, then that actually creates hurricanes. And so they’ll be able to tell, much more in advance, I mean now we can only really accurately forecast weather systems five days in advance, or whatever, locally, but they’ll be able to tell on a global scale, they’ll be able to predicts months and months in advance, possibly longer, I’m not sure, what the weather systems are going to be like. That has a direct impact again on crops. If you know it’s going to be a long, dry period, or if you know it’s going to be a long wet period, and you live in those particular types of climates, you can then plan your crops better. So the information is going to have a far-reaching effect for so many systems. That’s why it’s very very important.