nke Instrumentation has extensive experience in the design and the manufacturing equipment useful for oceanographers’ studies of the evolution of oceans and climate. The company benefits from a technical team specialized in the development of profiling floats and allows NKE Instrumentation to offer to its customers various types of floats – such as the standard ARVOR and PROVOR profiling floats, bio and specific profiling floats and high and low depth profiling floats. The technical team is involved in European scientific projects.

Standard profiling floats

NKE Instrumentation is involved in the international ARGO program in order to supply profiling floats measuring temperature and salinity. Therefore one of the company’s key activities is the development of these floats in order to support the scientific community, notably in partnership with IFREMER. The so-called “standard” profiling floats are the ARVOR and PROVOR ranges, which communicate by ARGOS or Iridium transmission the CTD data collected autonomously during acquisition periods. These profiling floats can also be fitted with other sensors including a dissolved oxygen sensor.

Bio & specific profiling floats

NKE Instrumentation has developed new kinds of specific profiling floats to be adapted to any environmental cases. In partnership with LOV (Laboratoire Oceanographique de Villefrance) and Ifremer, during the Remocean and Naos project, they have developed new kinds of profiling floats so that the PROVOR profiling float can embed additional sensors to the standard CTD. It means the floats are now capable to be part of various types of missions. NKE Instrumentation has also developed profiling float for Polar Regions to operate as well under ice than as floating offshore.

High & low depth profiling floats

NKE Instrumentation has developed very high and very low depth profiling floats. The DEEP ARVOR provides salinity, temperature and pressure profiles up to 4000 meters depth, using proven ARFO sensor and the data can also be transmitted by iridium satellite system and the float is GPS positioned. At the contrary, the ARVOR C is a subsurface profiling float designed to operate in coastal environment and perform oceanographic measurement as a pseudo-eulerian station It can perform more than 300 profiles and transmits its data via the iridium satellite system.