The primary goal of the ARGO program is to maintain a global array of autonomous profiling floats as part of  a global climate observing system and to serve the data requirements of the operational modelling community.

The specific aims are to:

• detect climate variability over seasonal to decadal time-scales including changes in the large-scale distribution of temperature and salinity and in the transport of these properties by large-scale ocean circulation.
• provide information needed for the calibration of satellite measurements.
• deliver data for the initialisation and constraint of operational and climate models.

ARGO Germany is the fourth largest contributor to the global array (in terms of instrument numbers) after the US, Japan and Australia.