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

Abstract

What role do governance arrangements, background legal rules, and the core infrastructures play in enabling data collection, determining what “ocean data” is produced, and when and how it is made available? We explore this question by focusing on data about oceanic features produced by Argo – an international program, operationalized by state agencies and research institutions, that comprises arrays of autonomous floats for ocean observation. Through examination of annual meeting notes, interviews, and observation of the Argo Steering Committee’s annual meeting, 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 then 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 challenge the utility of “ocean data” as an analytical category and highlight the risks of over-coordination and institutionalization of data infrastructures. We suggest that allowing data infrastructures like Argo to develop organically might lead to productive (if unexpected) connections, fusions, or splits, which might in turn reorient the focus of observation towards unexplored interactions between and within earth systems. We hope that our analysis helps bring to the fore some core data-infrastructural features of planetary governance as it now exists and will (have to) rapidly further evolve.

Keywords: data governance, ocean data, data infrastructure, thinking infrastructurally, Argo, planetary governance, scientific data