An international group of oceanographers have finished deploying the last robot that will allow them to observe the effect of climate change on the world's oceans in real time.

It has taken seven years, but the scientists have finally released 3,000 robots called Argo floats, which will beam their data to satellites and on to the scientists in their offices.

Now 50 scientists from 15 countries are spending this week at the CSIRO marine labs in Hobart, working out what they will do when the results start coming in.

In Greek mythology, the Argo was the name of the ship Jason and the Argonauts used to find the Golden Fleece.

In this story the Argo is a robot. The 1.5-metre tall floats are dropped into the ocean by scientists studying climate change.

The robots drop to depths of two kilometres, measuring temperature salinity and pressure.

It drifts along at 1,000 metres but pops up to the surface to send data back to control centres in France and the US.

Professor Dean Roemmich works at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California.

"I think the way to think of Argo is it is similar to satellite in coverage but it's looking at the sub-surface ocean rather than the sea surface like a satellite does," he said.

"The purpose of having 3,000 of them out there is to give us that sort of distributed dense global coverage that you need in order to really see the variability in the oceans."

Professor Roemmich has just won the world's most prestigious oceanographic prize for his work in developing Argo to monitor climate change.