Sensoring the Oceans: The Argo Floats Array in the Governance of Science Data Infrastructures

What role do governance arrangements, background legal rules, and the core infrastructures play in enabling collection and production of oceans data, and other data and knowledge of planetary significance? We explore this by focusing on Argo – an international program of research institutions and state agencies that deploys arrays of autonomous environmental sensor-equipped floats to collect and process ocean observation data that is then made freely available to all. We analyze the techniques and practices involved in planning, testing, calibrating, validating, and error-correcting that ultimately lead to the production, transmission, and dissemination of Argo data. We position Argo within the institutional governance of oceans, weather, climate and, most recently, earth systems to illustrate both the evolution of Argo’s role and its evolving and uneasy position within different governance approaches. In the conclusion, we highlight the advantages of organic network-based open science-data infrastructural initiatives in the development of planetary knowledge and governance, and point to some of the risks and trade-offs if this were to become subsumed into wider and more formalized international data-infrastructure hierarchies.