We are very proud to share with you that The Oceanography Society (TOS) has awarded the Ocean Observing Team Award to the Global Ocean Ship-Based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP). This well-deserved recognition of what’s a critical and fundamental ocean observing program, highlights GO-SHIP’s enormous contribution to our understanding of the global ocean and its role in the oceanic-terrestrial-atmospheric-human Earth System.
Since 2007 when IOCCP and CLIVAR communities established GO-SHIP, we have been an active supporter of the Program, and several former and current IOCCP Scientific Steering Group and Project Office members are amongst the named individuals who will be recognized during The Oceanography Society’s Awards Breakfast taking place on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, during the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.
Effective and sustainable monitoring of the physical, biogeochemical and ecosystem structure of the ocean, to enable climate adaptation, carbon management and sustainable marine resource management continuous to be urgently needed. Almost two decades after its inception the focus of the program continuous to be on the highest-quality measurements, achieved by making laboratory analyses of water samples that can be traced to internationally-agreed reference materials and best practices. The gathering of water samples also allows GO-SHIP to be early adopters of new parameters, such as in the nascent Bio GO-SHIP program.
The GO-SHIP high-quality observations of individual parameters have been widely used to document the global ocean’s water mass properties and their multi-decadal evolution. It formed the basis for the first data-based estimate of the global ocean inventory of anthropogenic carbon. Other examples include model evaluation, model initialization, water mass analyses, ocean acidification, calibration of Argo biogeochemical sensor measurements, calibration of multiple linear regression and neural-network-based methods for biogeochemical data estimation, contextualization of paleo-oceanographic data, and calculation of inventory, transport, and variability of ocean carbon.
GO-SHIP also provides critical reference data for the evaluation of data quality in the Argo program, which has revolutionized ocean observation by providing real-time, freely accessible global data using relatively widely available, cost-effective simple robotics. Early in Argo, these measurements were physical measurements of temperature and salinity. More recently, GO-SHIP has provided data from laboratory analysis of discrete water samples for a wide range of biogeochemical parameters that are also measured on floats with bio-optical and electronic sensors. Without these reference data, the quality of the global Argo dataset could not be assured. For the evaluation of data from Deep Argo floats, GO-SHIP provides the overwhelming majority of traceable full-depth CTD data.
Finally, GO-SHIP hydrographic surveys to date, were not only successful in answering many first order questions about large-scale ocean circulation and carbon inventories, but due to the sheer size and cost of the effort, they brought together communities from almost 20 countries across most continents to work together, develop uniform operating procedures and data quality protocols. International collaboration, including multilateral co-funding of expeditions adds significant societal value to every effort, and GO-SHIP Team has been a champion in providing opportunities for multinational execution of individual tasks as well as in assuring completion of decadal surveys across participating nations.
GO-SHIP will continue to build the time-series of full-depth repeat ocean measurements capable of resolving decadal and longer time scale changes in the circulation and property storage (including heat, freshwater, oxygen and carbon) of the global oceans. At IOCCP we commit to continue facilitating international partnerships around GO-SHIP to enlarge the pool of participating nations and to enhance the impact of the Program beyond existing boundaries.
Read the full Award announcement including the Team that it honors here: https://tos.org/ocean-observing-team-award-go-ship
Join us in celebrating this achievement in Glasgow!