Creation of Drifter Technology for the Ocean and the Atmosphere Monitoring

In the early 70s, 20th century, the tools for studying the World Ocean (besides the already existing research vessels equipped with celestial navigation) were expanded with automatic buoys and remote sensing technologies. The first idea was to create the global observing system on basis of large quantity of surface mooring buoys, equipped with hydrological and meteorological equipment. The evaluation of this suggestion revealed the fact that such tool was too expensive. It was decided to construct a network on the basis of drifting buoys which are significantly cheaper. The article shows the results of scientific and practical efforts to perform a step by step development of the drifter technology, which is the main instrument for global observation in the Ocean now. The cycle of works executed from 1973 to 2016 provided a creation of a world-class drifter technology for solution of different scientific and practical challenges. The research results are actively used for the needs of the Russian Federation and the global drifter program. The prospect of future works is related to the national challenges on the research of the Arctic and other World Ocean regions, participation in national and international projects on calibration of satellite onboard systems for the Earth remote sensing and also to validation of numerical simulation results for refining the marine environment variability forecast.