Abstract. The French program Coriolis, as part of the French operational oceanographic system, produces the COriolis dataset for Re-Analysis (CORA) on a yearly basis. This dataset contains in-situ temperature and salinity profiles from different data types. The latest release CORA3 covers the period 1990 to 2010. Several tests have been developed to ensure a homogeneous quality control of the dataset and to meet the requirements of the physical ocean reanalysis activities (assimilation and validation). Improved tests include some simple tests based on comparison with climatology and a model background check based on a global ocean reanalysis. Visual quality control is performed on all suspicious temperature and salinity profiles identified by the tests, and quality flags are modified in the dataset if necessary. In addition, improved diagnostic tools have been developed -including global ocean indicators -which give information on the quality of the CORA3 dataset and its potential applications. CORA3 is available on request through the MyOcean Service Desk (http://www.myocean.eu/).

which can fuel 20%-100% of the nitrate uptake. Sinking particles represented <10% of total carbon fixation and -10%-50% of new production in terms of carbon and nitrogen. From these discrepancies it was suggested that (1) new production rates were overestimated because of the high level of nitrification that provided "regenerated nitrate" and (2) advection of dissolved organic carbon and nitrogen played an important role in export. The specific hydrodynamical circulation, a conveyor belt generated by upwelling at the equator and downwelling some degrees south, associated with biological in situ rcmineralization of ammonium and nitrate as well, appeared to be a very efficient system for recycling inorganic nitrogen in the euphotic layer and thus for supporting the high regenerated production levels. On the other hand, the high nitrate/silicate ratios (>1.5) observed in the upwelling waters seemed to indicate that silicate is not efficiently recycled in this specific circulation system because of its low regeneration rate as well as its sink via rapidly sedimenting diatoms cell walls; this may be also true for iron. This reinforces the idea of Si and/or Fe limitation which was put forward earlier to explain low new production levels in the equatorial Pacific. IntroductionNew production, defined as the fraction of primary production driven by the input of new nutrients (usually nitrate) into the euphotic zone [Dugdale and Goering, 1967], and export production, defined as the fraction of primary production exported as particles (carbon and nitrogen) [Eppley and Peterson, 1979], are important variables that characterize the efficiency of carbon and nitrogen cycling and particle export from the biological food web in the ocean. These fractions of photosynthetic production play a role in the transport of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the ocean interior, and their quantification is

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International audienceArgo floats have significantly improved the observation of the global ocean interior, but as the size of the database increases, so does the need for efficient tools to perform reliable quality control. It is shown here how the classical method of optimal analysis can be used to validate very large datasets before operational or scientific use. The analysis system employed is the one implemented at the Coriolis data center to produce the weekly fields of temperature and salinity, and the key data are the analysis residuals. The impacts of the various sensor errors are evaluated and twin experiments are performed to measure the system capacity in identifying these errors. It appears that for a typical data distribution, the analysis residuals extract 2/3 of the sensor error after a single analysis. The method has been applied on the full Argo Atlantic real-time dataset for the 2000–04 period (482 floats) and 15% of the floats were detected as having salinity drifts or offset. A second test was performed on the delayed mode dataset (120 floats) to check the overall consistency, and except for a few isolated anomalous profiles, the corrected datasets were found to be globally good. The last experiment performed on the Coriolis real-time products takes into account the recently discovered problem in the pressure labeling. For this experiment, a sample of 36 floats, mixing well-behaved and anomalous instruments of the 2003–06 period, was considered and the simple test designed to detect the most common systematic anomalies successfully identified the deficient floats

In the past two decades, the Argo Program has collected, processed, and distributed over two million vertical profiles of temperature and salinity from the upper two kilometers of the global ocean. A similar number of subsurface velocity observations near 1,000 dbar have also been collected. This paper recounts the history of the global Argo Program, from its aspiration arising out of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, to the development and implementation of its instrumentation and telecommunication systems, and the various technical problems encountered. We describe the Argo data system and its quality control procedures, and the gradual changes in the vertical resolution and spatial coverage of Argo data from 1999 to 2019. The accuracies of the float data have been assessed by comparison with high-quality shipboard measurements, and are concluded to be 0.002 • C for temperature, 2.4 dbar for pressure, and 0.01 PSS-78 for salinity, after delayed-mode adjustments. Finally, the challenges faced by the vision of an expanding Argo Program beyond 2020 are discussed.